


we only have each other

by perennial



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Canon Divergence, Elsa and Anna still save each other, Hans is not a sociopathic serial killer, Multi, how it should have ended, let's talk about fear, starts Anna/Hans but will eventually be Elsa/Hans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-18
Updated: 2015-01-10
Packaged: 2018-02-05 06:04:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 40,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1808077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennial/pseuds/perennial
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elsa and Hans make their way down the mountain, battling the winter elements, assassination attempts, and painful personal history - small change compared to what's in store for them back home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> As soon as it was clear that Kristoff was not intended for Elsa and Hans showed up at the ice palace, all I wanted from this movie was Elsa and Hans to fall for each other. But they couldn’t even give me that, could they?

** PART 1: The Mountain **

She wakes on an uncomfortable surface, at a strange angle. The blue sky is disorienting; her last memory is of the chandelier crashing toward her in the ice palace and her mind has not yet caught up to her physical location. She closes her eyes against a wave of vertigo and sits with her head bent toward her knees as sounds begin slowly trickling in—snorting horses, the crunch of snow underfoot, men’s voices calling to each other.

The unconscious queen had been settled on a hastily constructed sled. Thick pine boughs with smaller branches hacked off have been lashed together and strapped behind a pair of horses who stand quietly, riderless. A coat is spread beneath her but it is too thin to convert her mode of transport into one of comfort. She stares at her hands, both encased in iron cylinders, transforming the ends of her arms into heavy stumps.

Raised voices draw her eyes to a scene some distance away, where most of the men are digging in the snow. A recent avalanche has left a mountain pass in a state of upheaval, she gathers, and they are attempting to carve a path through the snow boulders. They call to each other—words of caution and clearance, instruction and encouragement.

A young gendarme trots over to her with a mug of hot coffee. He wedges it between her iron hands and adjusts the scarf she did not notice wrapped around her neck. He has plainly been appointed temporary nursemaid.

“Are you in pain, Your Majesty? They told me to ask you how many fingers I’m holding up.”

Physically she is perfectly fine, though she has come down hard from the high she experienced when building her ice palace. She gets rid of the gendarme and sips the drink while she observes the laborers. Her blood feels sluggish in her body, her lungs reluctant to inhale. Everything she sees seems to have taken on a gray pallor. After a few minutes she tosses away the coffee, now ice-cold and tasteless. With some effort she manages to tug the scarf off. It coils on the snow like a rope.

A blur of red enters her vision—Prince Hans of the Southern Isles in all his ginger glory. She watches him narrowly, looking for what caused her little sister to decide to bind the remainder of her life to this man when she had known him for little more than half a day. Anna’s open, lonely heart would admit anyone, and Elsa is not about to let her fling herself headlong into folly. There is no way of knowing if Hans was equally as charmed as Anna (suddenly, consumingly) was, and Elsa is—slightly—willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But anyone with a functioning brain can smell a rat.

For Anna’s sake she is determined to be fair. She is willing to be wrong if it means her sister will be happy. He works hard, she notes. There is nothing lazy about him, nor does he avoid the more difficult obstacles or assign any to another man. He is busy, deliberating with the surveyors ahead, rotating the diggers alongside him according to strength and fatigue. He is smart, she must hand it to him; the path he picks through the chaos is stable and the work necessitated is time- and labor-efficient. He is the only man digging in his shirtsleeves.

Readiness to labor is a sign of strong character, but anyone can work hard, whether in love or not. Intelligent leadership means he knows how to read others, knows what they want, knows how to give them a version of their fulfilled desire (something she has never done well, she reflects). Is he genuine or simply a good actor?

After a while the weight of her gaze on him becomes too heavy to ignore and he leaves his task and goes to her.

“Your Majesty.”

“Your Highness.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine. Thank you.” She returns his coat. He turns it over in his hands. If he insists she keep it, she will drop it in the snow behind the sled as soon as they are on the move again.

“Any chance you can help us with this?” he says, gesturing to the work. He is thinking of the stairway leading up to her palace, she knows.

She thinks: Absolutely not. She did not scale a mountain so that they could drag her back down. They can dig their way down the mountain for the next five years for all she is concerned.

“No,” she says. “I can only manipulate what I create.” It is a lie, and he knows it. She braces herself to be called out for her attempt at deception, her selfishness in the face of their difficulty—attributes unworthy of a queen, however new; and she knows the slightest intimidation will work: she was never given the words to refuse, and here she cannot hide behind a door or run away. She hates him for this sudden return to fear, for this familiar caged sensation. Her fetters frost over.

Thus, his next words are not what she expects.

“There is another matter, Queen Elsa,” he says slowly. “Princess Anna’s horse returned to Arendelle without her. Concern for her safety was the primary reason for this expedition. We have yet to locate her.”

She will give him this.

“I spoke with Anna not long before you arrived,” she tells him. “She had no horse with her. She did have two companions—mountain guides, I believe.”

The relief on his face is unpracticed. She finds herself thinking of the summer sun, golden and warm, flooding the sky with light without thought for who might be looking.

Then he frowns. “You saw her? But… you were still there, on the mountain. Didn’t she tell you, don’t you know what you—what’s happening in Arendelle?”

She keeps her mouth closed tight. What right has he to interrogate her, or question her choices?

He says, “You don’t trust me, do you?”

“Anna is heir to the throne, and you are the last of thirteen sons,” she says coolly.

He does not speak, just breathes in and out steadily and meets her eyes. She remembers: his gaze locked with hers, calling her out of the battle rage that had sent her to push a man into a precipice and drive an ice spear toward another’s throat; eyes widening with alarm before the crossbow fired.

“If you saved my life so that I would bless your marriage to my sister,” she says, “it’s a start.”

The tightness leaves his face. He grins.


	2. Chapter 2

The going is slow. The search party left the castle without knowledge of the state of affairs on the mountain, and the equipment normally utilized during severe weather currently sits uselessly in storage. They move in bursts, the route repeatedly taking them over clear terrain that stops abruptly before one blockade after another. What would typically take ten minutes to traverse, even in icy weather, now takes an hour.

The weather in the Southern Isles is mild, Prince Hans tells her, and there are no mountains tall enough to have avalanches. She thinks he is adapting to the climate change with remarkable ease.

Only the queen is pleased to confront each new snow-filled pass, though she masks her approval with the poker face that is the result of a decade’s practice. She could not have done better were her hands free. She is in no hurry to descend.

For her part, she has far less trouble with the snow than her own body. A gendarme with some medical knowledge informs her she has a mild concussion. She walks to stay alert, falling upon her rough chariot when dizzy spells hit. Her iron fists only add to her discomfort.

Her two would-be assassins are bound as well, though it would appear the soldiers only thought to bring one pair of manacles like hers. They are roped up around the chest, their wrists lashed behind them, scowling and stumbling their way down the mountain. The prince’s eyes are busy, as through moving down a mental checklist—making sure the snowy peaks above are not preparing to expel their contents upon the travelers, monitoring the energy levels of his men (when did she begin considering them his men?), confirming that the knots holding Weselton’s henchmen are still tight. When his eyes light upon her she does not know what he is checking, unless simply verifying that she is still present.

Opportunities to hinder their progress quickly present themselves. Upon discovering that walking slows the group down considerably, she dispenses with the sled as much as possible. When they are in motion she frequently falls to the rear, literally dragging her feet, forcing the soldiers who monitor her (for her safety or theirs?) to slow their horses to the point of circling her. When they offer the services of their mounts they are refused; she claims the jolting motion hurts her already aching head, which they cannot dispute.

The men are wary of her, keeping their distance as though expecting her to turn them into blocks of ice if they come too close, despite the iron encasing her hands.

“…ought to be locked up in stronger things than _those_ , if you…”

“ _Monster_.” The word is a low hiss in her ears. Her chin stays level and her face is blank. If there is any excess water in the eyes fixed on the path ahead it is unseen by any around her.

Only Prince Hans seems fearless. He is determined to look after her, she notes with irritation. She regrets the scant encouragement given earlier. Well, he may be as charming as he likes; she is neither as trusting or as receptive as Anna and she knows his true motive. A hastily-fashioned friendship between them will not secure her blessing on such a foolishly arranged marriage. He could wash her garments by hand in the icy mountain streams and then carry her across them on his back for all it would do to win her approval. It is not her intention to entertain a performance; she wants to see the heart of him.

Despite her exasperation her gaze stays locked on him for the duration of the journey, assessing, evaluating. If he feels self-conscious he does not let on: his movements are natural, confident without becoming cocksure. He has won over the people, she overhears the soldiers tell the mountaineer who led them to the summit, their eyes full of hero-worship. When the crisis hit he made sure they were fed, that everyone had blankets and fuel for their fires. He led the council meetings in addressing potential short- and long-term consequences of the ice entrapment, developing plans in regard to trade, crops, water, and military vulnerability. He intended them to be prepared for anything.

Elsa realizes she never even asked Anna who was looking after the kingdom with both of them absent. With every new mark in Hans’ favor she awakens to another point of her own negligence.

She wonders uneasily just how bad the ice is. Arendelle lives through winter every year. Surely this is no worse than average.

The foreign prince talks to the men as one might address his peers, though he never loses the mien of quiet authority that has distinguished him from them since the beginning. He listens, laughs, encourages. His first priority in this trek across the ice is their safety, even at possible loss or sacrifice of something precious—a horse, a sword—and they know it and love him for it. With their cares heaped on his shoulders, a restfulness enters their eyes. In return they give him cheerful labor.

Anna would have befriended them all by now, but Elsa cannot fathom how to begin.

With each step down the mountain she feels herself sliding back into the girl who fled her own coronation celebration—insecure, reserved, always hiding. Don’t they understand that she is better at a distance? They are right to fear her. She could hurt them if they come too close. The people do not want _her_ for queen; they could not possibly, because they don’t know her. They want her parents’ daughter, and Anna fills that requirement.

“Your Majesty,” says the prince’s voice. She cannot look at him. He will see—it’s all over her face. He repeats himself patiently, thinking she did not hear him. She composes herself and turns to see what he wants.

He has brought her another mug of coffee. Someone has a small barrel of it strapped to their horse, one cold-weather provision that was not overlooked.

“I am not cold.”

“It will strengthen you. We still have half the mountain to descend.”

She considers reminding him of her restful bed of pine bumps, but drinks the coffee instead. The manacles are slick with ice and he has to help her.

“I prefer cocoa,” she tells him, then cringes at what sounds like ungratefulness. “I only mean—that’s what they always gave my sister and I when it was cold outside. That’s what I’m used to.”

His face is alert, listening. He is thirsty for knowledge of Anna, she realizes.

She chooses the words carefully, as though feeding out a line into the water. “Winter was our favorite season. We used to play in the snow for hours. Building snow families, snow forts; snow angels sending ice down my neck. Our snowball fights ranged all over the grounds. Anna wasn’t very good in ice skates but we would go sledding. Fly down the hill, trudge up the hill, repeat. Sometimes I marked off areas to preserve them like a picture—‘No one may walk here’—and Anna would on purpose.”

She remembers it like a dream: a carpet of snow on the long castle lawns, fringed by towering pines with snow-covered limbs, trying to catch frozen flakes on her tongue, writing her name in the shallow layer of snow on the low stone walls and bridge posts. They stayed outside until they could not feel their toes and even then they had to be called in. They would struggle out of snow-filled boots and damp coats and follow their mother to the table where mugs of cocoa waited. “Mine usually burned my tongue,” she tells him, “and while it cooled I held my face over the top to let the steam warm my cheeks.” They would set their things by the fire to dry, and Elsa liked to sit by the window and watch powder drift from the pine branches and listen to the hiss of water burning off of her mittens.

They would be given baths and sent to bed, but when the castle was quiet and all inhabitants asleep, Anna would wake her—or she would wake Anna, the first person to really see what she could do—and they would sneak into the empty ballroom. She would weave peaks and valleys and shallow frozen ponds. Then they would spin in circles until they collapsed in dizzy heaps into the snow, cheeks pressed against it, ice in their hair.

“Used to?” he asks.

“Until I hurt her,” she says in a low voice. “Unintentionally, but I did it. And I will never let it happen again.” Why must he take her back to Arendelle?

“I think it already has,” he says, and her heart chills at the belief that she has struck her sister unknowingly, until she realizes he does not mean physical pain.

“Do you know what she told me, Queen Elsa? That you shut her out. That you live behind doors you have closed in her face. And you never told her why.”

She looks away.

“But you loved it,” he says gently. “Playing outside, together—I can hear it in your voice. She isn’t the only one who was hurt, is she?”

She is saved from having to answer by the panting arrival of one of the soldiers, who reports that a horse has slipped and dropped a pack of tools which then slid into a crevasse. Hans’ face darkens at the news of one more element to thwart their advance and he follows the man. Elsa swallows, grateful for the removal of his too-perceptive gaze; she still does not know where the impulse came from to tell him so much of her past. Perhaps, she thinks, it has to do with the fact that hiding is unnecessary now. Everyone saw. Everyone knows.

The thought stops her in her tracks. She feels as though she has been pushing at a closed door that has opened unexpectedly and ushered her through unbalanced. Hiding is unnecessary now: that means no more secrets. It means she doesn’t have to cover her icy tracks like a thief in the night. It means Anna can know everything.


	3. Chapter 3

Forming a sense of Hans’ character is easy enough: she just has to keep an eye on him. As it happens, however, reading his heart without Anna there to interact with him is far harder to do than Elsa anticipated. According to her books, lovers spew poetry, but she has yet to hear a stanza from him.

He notices her scrutiny and makes no comment; but during a point when they are stalled again and he is melting down snow for the horses to drink, he catches her eyes on him and holds her gaze.

“Am I being judged?” he calls.

“ ‘All of life is preparation for the next test.’ ”

“Hammersmith,” he smiles. “You read the philosophers?"

“I read everything.” Books are the one source of respite from her constantly-raging internal storm; when she lives within them, she forgets her surroundings, her hands, herself.

He hefts a snow-filled gendarme’s hat. Switching it with one hanging over a small fire, he adds the one that is finished melting to the line of three already on the ground. With what she considers a great deal of fuss and maneuvering he slides a pole through their chinstraps and lifts the pole onto his shoulders so that two buckets hang at each end.

He says, “That answers one question. I wondered how a princess who has never traveled abroad is so at ease conversing with ambassadors from every corner of the world. Simply quote their great men to them and they topple over with adoration. So simple; why has no one told me?”

“Queen,” she corrects, but she is smiling.

He pulls a face of exaggerated contrition and bows dramatically, buckets swinging crazily on the pole and water sloshing out, and departs with a grin over his shoulder at her.

Two of the soldiers wander past, pipes in their mouths, a hewn birch sapling balanced on their shoulders. One end has been sharpened to a point. The ice here must be proving more difficult than usual.

“Just like him,” the man in front says over his free shoulder. “Making sure everyone and everything is cared for. Best sort of man, is the prince.”

The other agrees. “Not even his homeland and he’s done more for us than most people living here do in their lifetimes. I’ll follow that one anywhere he leads.”

He seems too good to be true.

A voice in her head says: You are jealous.

Why should you care if they love him? You walked away from them. They should be led by someone kind, intelligent, ready to serve. You never wanted to be queen; they deserve someone who embraces the responsibility. Let him marry her. Give them crowns, and leave for good.

She thinks: You are jealous, you are jealous, you are a coward.

Propping her chin on her iron hands, she studies the latest addition to the ever-growing list of clogged mountain passes. It will be clear to enter soon, despite the unyielding ice; the diggers are becoming experts at their task. What if they didn’t dig, though, but packed the snow down instead? The party could cross above on snowshoes, laying planks for the horses.

Prince Hans returns with the pole in one hand and empty hats swinging from the other.

“If I were you—” she begins, and blinks.

She far outranks him and her word is law, but he moves through the motions of leadership with such ease and sense that it seems natural to turn to him for action or answers. If he were her, he would not be sitting on the fringes, watching everyone else labor. He would look for a way to contribute—and that means something other than a mouthful of advice he probably does not need. If the snow could hold weight they would be crossing over it instead of through.

And anyway, she does not want to go back.

 _Anna can know everything_.

“I’d like to help,” she tells him.

She thinks he will unlock her hands and direct her to clear what remains of the blockage, but he has evidently thought better of his earlier request. So he does not trust her either, she notes.

Instead he sets her up at the cookfire. A sack of potatoes was unearthed during the digging and the prince has set himself the task of roasting them. The job is a tricky one—they are ice-cold and heat unevenly. Two have already exploded, one projectile barely missing the eye of the gendarme who greeted Elsa that morning. With her hands encased, she can reach into the fire and withdraw unharmed.

She knows etiquette, diplomacy, and foreign policy, but never dreamed she would be kneeling in the snow beside another royal, attempting to cook. To some it might take a good swallow of their pride to perform such a menial task, but all day she has been watching Hans serve everyone present without a moment’s hesitation, and if he can she certainly can too.

Soon she has the knack of it and has turned the chore into something of a game—seeing how fast she can move through the flames, how evenly she can heat the potatoes without allowing scorch marks, finding the ideal place in the cinders for each varied size. She wonders if this is how the village mothers feel: happy to have food to provide to their children, anxious for it to taste appetizing, hopeful that it will strengthen and cheer them.

He monitors her work while continuing to melt down snow for the diggers and horses. “Well done,” he says approvingly, and she lowers her eyes to hide the glow she knows has entered them at the sound of words so rarely heard.

“May I ask you something?”

She braces herself for a barrage of questions about Anna.

“Your powers,” he begins, then seems at a loss.

“I am not a sorceress, or cursed—though it often feels like it,” she tells him. “I was born with my powers. Uncommon for humans but not unheard of. Much more common among other species. Every troll tribe has at least one healer. All sirens are born with powers of song.”

“Why did you hide it?”

“To protect Anna. Later, to protect everyone.”

“How does it work?

“If I knew that, we wouldn’t be in this predicament, would we? My turn. Why are you doing all this, Hans? Looking after Arendelle, rescuing me…”

She cannot doubt the sincerity of his tone. “Arendelle is going to be my home. I want to protect it.”

Of course he does.

“In a similar vein—I cannot help but notice your sudden eagerness to advance our progress, Your Majesty.”

“I want to talk to my sister.”

He frowns. “What about?”

She stiffens. “Would you try to prevent me? She’s my sister!”

“The last time you two had a heart-to-heart, you froze the entire fjord.” He looks unyielding, protective.

“It will be different this time. I need to explain some things… a lot of things. And apologize.”

His mouth softens infinitesimally.

“There is a great deal to forgive,” she tells the flames.

“The lifetime you spent shutting her out, you mean.”

“We were close, once.” Her voice is soft.

He glances at her but says nothing. The question he won’t ask is loud as a shout, though, ricocheting off the walls of rock and snow. She gives him a brief account of the night she struck Anna with ice, the visit to the trolls, the resulting changes.

He is quiet for a while, working. “Trolls,” he says finally. “We don’t have trolls at home. We have selkies, but they’re hardly intelligent beings, they’re more like pets.”

Elsa has never had a pet, not even a horse of her own, for fear of freezing it to death with any kind of touch.

He tells her about his stallion, Sitron. The foal had been sickly and small and without promise. That was all the knowledge Hans had needed. The prince had fed the horse by hand, slept most nights in the straw beside him. Sitron had grown strong, and was now the pride of the royal stables. Many might think it strange to have an animal as his best friend, but not many were so fortunate to have a companion as clever and brave as he did. “He’s saved my life more than once,” he tells her. “Though, come to think of it, I’ve saved his quite a few times too. Ah, well, why start counting? He can’t.”

When does she shift from studying him for defects to lingering on the details of his face? The way his eyes focus on the task before him, the sharp lines of his profile, the way the corners of his mouth turn down when he speaks, naturally turn up when his face is at rest, freckles that get lost in the redness of his cheeks from the cold.

He looks up and she drops her eyes in a hurry. She wonders what he sees when he looks at her. Anna?

“You ought to have a horse,” he decides, “even if you only stand there and talk to it. The companionship of an animal is invaluable. If I’d had Sitron as a child, my whole life might have been different. I’m sure your stable master will know of one especially suited to you.”

She thinks of her ice palace, now standing vacant. “What a consolation for solitude and safety.”

He says, “You don’t have to be afraid,” and she knows he is not referring to the equine companionship awaiting her in Arendelle.

He has no idea.

“My whole life, fear was like a skeleton. It lived in every part of me, controlled my every movement. I came to this mountain and suddenly I was free. The fear was gone. But I was wrong. A skeleton isn’t skin, it isn’t something you can shed. It’s what builds you into the person you are, and it keeps you that way.”

“Rigid and breakable?” he retorts, frustrated.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Do you think you are the first person to ever feel trapped and alone?” he flares. “At least you had a mostly happy childhood. At least your sister adores you. Not everyone gets that. My parents were always busy. They had a large family and a large kingdom, and we were in the midst of a civil war for most of my childhood, though I was hardly aware of it. By the time my tenth brother was born, it was taken for granted that the elder sons would bring up the younger ones. As you may expect, pre-adolescent boys make poor parents.

“Over the course of my life, for spans of time ranging from months to years, various brothers of mine didn’t speak directly to me or call me by name, called me the wrong name as through I had been erroneously informed of my birth name, acted as though I was invisible, spit on my food before every meal, soaked my blankets with water just before bedtime—sometimes they forgot and so poured it on me after I had fallen asleep, told me the wrong names of any esteemed personages dining with us, and generally undermined my confidence in anything about my natural world. They always thought it was all a great joke, referred to what they did as pranks. Quite the role models, wouldn’t you say.”

Elsa wonders how many people have heard what he is telling her. It is too fresh a vitriol to be a cut recently cleaned out; Anna has not heard it, at least not the whole of it, that is certain. She senses this is not a topic he lets himself revisit often.

“They told me I was the youngest because I was the least wanted, last chosen. For a long time I thought I had to prove my worth. Validate my existence. Remembering that I am not inferior is the _choice_ , the mantra in my head. Inferiority is still the instinct, the foundational belief; but when I learned I could fight it, I gave it everything I had. I read the philosophers. I began watching people, noticed the differences between the sort of man I wanted to be and the sort I didn’t, learned the reasons for the difference—the choices they made, the words they spoke, the values they held, what they let creep into their hearts and what they kept out. I feigned confidence instead of fear and it became genuine. I did good things I could be proud of, if only to know that I could. I set my own standard and I hold myself to that and no one else’s.”

She thinks: There, _there_ is the difference. He rose above his circumstances, and you buckled before yours.

She does not know the right words, so she keeps silent. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath in and lets it out; and when he opens his eyes, his gaze is clear and steady once more.

They work without speaking, passing tools in a comfortable rhythm. She reflects that with the exception of ice she has never created anything, useful or otherwise, in her life. She likes the visible product. She likes that even her small effort has tangible results. What he said about knowing oneself to be useful lingers in her mind and she understands.

“Your turn,” he says.

“Once we built a snowman who looked just like a diplomat from Corona. He had teeth like a rabbit and ears that stuck out from his head like teacups. We built it right at the entrance, so everyone passing through the gate saw. My mother was horrified. We weren’t allowed outside for a week, until he left.”

“What about after that?” he persists. “All your stories occur when you’re eight. What about the rest of your life?”

“There _is_ nothing after that.”

For a moment he looks bewildered. _I told him about my fear and it made him angry_ , she reflects; _people with stories of victory forget that not everyone has one of their own to contribute_. Even so, his expression softens into comprehension, then compassion.

She wants to distract him from his pity. “Maybe that will change now.” She injects brightness into her voice. “The gates have been closed so no one could find out about me, but that’s no longer an issue.” Especially if she leaves and Anna takes the throne. No one will get hurt, and—“Having more people around will make Anna happy.”

“Have I passed, then?” he says. “Will you give us your blessing?”

Anxiety and vexation surge through her. “Weren’t you listening? You can’t marry someone you just met!”

“We would hardly be the first.”

“You barely know her,” she argues.

“She is brave and honest and joyful and loving.”

“So are a lot of people! Are you in love with my sister or a definition?”

“We will make each other happy.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I know the important things,” he says mulishly.

“What do you consider important?”

“What I just told you.” He sounds exasperated.

“Are you sure? Because I consider details important. They are what separate one person from the next, after all. Are you a morning person or a night owl?”

“Morning.”

“Oh? Anna is so at one with the night, she’s almost a cat. She’ll wake you up without apology and drag you out to see every asteroid shower on the calendar. Do you have dogs?”

“Three.”

“She’s allergic. What about boats?”

“What about them? Is she allergic to boats too?”

“Do you like boating?”

“Of course. I’m from an archipelago.”

“She gets seasick if she steps in a puddle. She does like heights, though. Maybe you could get one of those flying machines—they’re said to be like sailing in the air.”

He blanches.

“Or not?”

“I love her,” he says, but with a shade of uncertainty that was not there before.

“You don’t _know_ her.”

“I love her,” he repeats.

She looks at him a long moment. “Loyal. Stubborn, but loyal.”

“What?”

“I’m compiling a list.”

The entire situation confuses her. He is not impulsive; every choice he must make is given due consideration, and there is merit to this method: he gets the results he wants, and the men trust him. He never acts on a whim. How could such a man propose to a woman he barely knows?

She does not ask, but he reads the question on her in the unsettling way he has a knack for. He takes a deep breath, and for some reason she holds hers.

“When I met Anna, it was like finally finding the home I’ve wanted my whole life. She pulled me in. It was like walking into open arms, warm and waiting.”

Her heart twists with—

Regret—she should have been that person to Anna. And Anna had wanted it from her, wanted her to be those arms, wanted her to fill _hers_ , asked her to do so countless times. What could they have done, built, learned together?

 _Don’t feel_.

Hopelessness—to hear how easy it is for them, both of them, to make affection such an effortless thing, knowing she will never be able to do the same. How often has she longed to embrace her sister, her people, only to stare at her love as though it an object she doesn’t know how to operate?

_Don’t feel!_

Envy—and it makes her sick, to envy her sweet sister who deserves the best the world has to offer, who is not cursed, who should not have been held back from life. She knows what Anna sees when she looks at Hans—an opportunity to live, taking every forward step together, his warm arms holding her up to the sun.

_Don’t FEEL!_

She walks away from him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for such a positive response! Always nice to know I’m not alone in my disappointment.


	4. Chapter 4

It happens after the next mountain pass. The men are hungry and short-tempered. The potatoes did not go far and the group’s appetites only grow with each new blockade that must be dug through. Prince Hans lets it show as little as possible but he is flagging too, and the charisma that carried them through most of the day has dimmed.

“The cause of all this,” someone mutters. Such comments have been quietly directed at the queen all day but have increased in frequency since the last pass was navigated.

Snow crunches under her feet. The sled horses follow her inexperienced lead good-naturedly; they are perhaps the only cheerful members of the party, having been fed two apples found stuffed into the potato sack.

“Witch,” says the same voice, more distinctly.

Not everyone is on horseback: the two riders who gave their mounts for her barely-used sled are walking, and perhaps half of the remainder lead their horses by foot out of fear of invisible ice patches. The prince is one of them, but the prince is far ahead, deep in animated discussion with one of the captains about something they see beyond the horizon visible to her. The line straggles but the majority is grouped here.

“ _Monster_.”

An unsettling murmur ripples through the group behind her. Elsa turns to find an alarming number of hostile eyes fixed on her face.

The Weselton henchmen are the speakers, and they continue their verbal assault unchecked by the others. Worse, the others are listening. She sees the thugs’ intent: to stir up terror and anger in the other men so that they will shift the henchmen’s bindings to her body. Or worse.

“Hers is dark sorcery!”

“She has only ever told you lies!”

Fear whips through the assemblage, darkening their faces. She recognizes the uncertainty, can almost feel the tension in those braced bodies, eyes on alert. But the expressions on their faces shift into something darker, more violent than she has ever seen reflected back from her face in the mirror. The iron casings on her hands grow heavy and she is unsurprised to find them wholly iced over.

The stokers fan the ready flames.

“You know what sorceresses can do. We have all heard the reports! The sorceress who turned a boy into a man-eating beast. The sorceress who transformed herself into a dragon and slaughtered a castle full of people, including two royal families. The sorceress who could change at will from beautiful woman to old hag, and went about poisoning her people so she might eat their hearts.”

“What has this one been doing all these years alone, shut away from prying eyes? _Honing her skills!_ She pretends to be weak and harmless, but the second you trust her, beware! You will find a spear of ice jutting from your heart!”

“ _No_ , I would never!”

“She’ll destroy the city!”

“She’ll kill us all!”

Elsa cannot even deny the last accusation. Indeed she might, however unintentionally. The men appear to believe it is a certain thing.

“What can we do?”

“How do we stop her? We must stop her!”

She backs away from the group, trying to keep them all in her line of sight. It is no use: they surround her.

“Stay back,” she cries, powerless against them. Those on horseback circle tightly and block any avenue of escape. The men on the ground close in on her with ease and grip her arms too tightly.

One says cautiously, “The prince—”

The henchman with the moustache answers. “Gives you his blessing. Why do you think he rode so far away? What he cannot see he is not obliged to put to a stop.”

Still they hesitate; again the men from Weselton are snake-tongued. “You would have a monster live among you? _Rule_ you?”

“Ought to get it done before we’re off the mountain,” a gendarme says. “Otherwise she’ll escape.” A few discuss dropping her into a nearby crevasse.

“Too chancy. What if she can fly?” This is met with mockery by some and fear by others.

“Tie her to a tree and leave her.”

“Cut her hands off. That’s not treason and it takes care of the problem.”

“Nay, idiot, she can do it with her feet.”

“Cut off her feet too, then.”

One of the henchmen calls, “She’s too dangerous. You’ve seen what she can do! Do you want your hearts turned to ice? Cut her throat, _now_ , before she’s in any position to fight back—unless you don’t want to make it back alive to your soft beds and the arms of your loved ones.”

She shrinks away from them, protesting and struggling. Without her hands free she is helpless as a child. There might be hope, though: many of the faces are troubled, and hardly anyone is as vocal in their desire to murder as are the henchmen, though all looks cast her way are apprehensive.

And shouldn’t it come to this? a small part of her acquiesces. She does not know how to stop herself either. Isn’t this best? Years of failure—a lifetime without a shred of control over her own body—power growing as hope drained—how many times has she wished herself dead? Her misery ended and her people safe, _isn’t this best?_

But—Anna.

“Nothing more than an icicle, after all,” the henchmen jeer. “Beautiful and easily broken.”

Given a little time, it won’t matter how many are conflicted. The angriest among them will overcome all resistance, and that place of pride is filled by Weselton’s men. “Monster,” hisses the one who shot the arrow that sent the chandelier crashing to the ground. She reads vengeance on his face. She nearly killed them in her palace, and would have— _should have_ —had not Hans—

Then the southern prince is there, charging into the crowd atop Sitron, his face a sight to behold. Her captors turn pale. They back away as he leaps down from the horse. Two strides take him to her side.

He grips the man restraining her by his neck.

“That is your _queen_ ,” he snarls and throws him to the ground.

She nods once to his questioning look, whereat he turns back to the group. Wrathful almost past speech, he informs them in no uncertain terms just what they can expect will happen to anyone who so much as breathes too heavily in her direction. He gags the men from Weselton himself, using their own filthy long socks, yanking the bindings with such force that they choke.

Quelled, the voyagers return to the uncertain path. She watches them pass, many apologetic, some bitter, all fearful—doubly now, at the possibility of retribution. Hans stands across from her and also observes. He still breathes hard and she still shakes.

She should feel relieved, she knows, like a fact her brain accepts and her heart cannot. But she feels farther from them than she ever has. They have cut a cord, today; the message is clear: she is too dangerous to live, too different to help, too abominable to desire as one of their own. Her self-loathing is now a communal sentiment. It makes her want to dissolve into snow and vanish in the mountain air.

She wonders what sort of queen she can possibly be now that they know, that they would commit treason from terror of her. What sort of queen can she hope to be regardless, whose lack of control might destroy her people at any time, and might already have done? she thinks listlessly, before remembering that Anna will be queen, not she. Anna queen—oh, Anna, queen, how will she guide them without any natural intuition? They two, with their disastrous good intentions and impulsive reactions! It is almost laughable. What a royal family!

But it is odd, as the men pass by, to read the relief in their eyes. Hans saved them from what they might have done. He broke up the turmoil, much like he did with her in the ice palace, waking her up when she stood hardly an inch from murder. All they need do is look at him to regain their assurance. Here is something sturdy, stalwart; he follows her—nothing more is required. His confidence instantly restores their loyalty with an effectiveness hours of speech from the Weselton rogues could never achieve.

She feels a strange calm. It doesn’t matter if she is cursed or that they fear her or that Anna has no proper training. They will have him.

When the last man has gone past, they fall into step at the back. Everyone might be as remorseful as they please; under no circumstances does she want anyone behind her. All the men are armed.

He touches her elbow.

“It’s not true,” he tells her. “Don’t listen to them.”

“I am a monster. You said it yourself.”

“That is _not_ what I said.”

A shout from the front—it is the captain with whom the prince was speaking before the posse assembled. Something needs attention around the next bend.

He grinds his teeth in frustration and mounts. Then he holds out a hand. She places her own in it automatically, conditioned by now to follow his every lead. When he pulls her up to sit in front of him she is not surprised; she has already read the unwillingness in his face to leave her unprotected at the back of the crowd. It is a relief to not be left far from his sword hand, at least until her manacles come off.

Afraid of the damage the slightest touch might do, she tries to avoid any contact with Sitron. She is unable to grasp anything with her hands confined as they are so the prince has to hold her. It is her first time on horseback in thirteen years; she cannot summon up any yearning to resume such a jolting, unstable hobby.

They canter across the snow to meet the captain. She looks out over the landscape visible from the ridge they are crossing. Soon they will be back in Arendelle. Soon she will be with Anna, and soon she will vanish for good. Everyone will be safe from her; the fear she encountered today, so different from the brand that usually flavors her tongue, will disperse with her departure. She will bury herself somewhere desolate, a place no one would desire to settle, and eke out the rest of her days building palaces of ice and tearing them down.

The straight figure in blue-gray is solid and warm against her back. She watches the snow pass rapidly under the stallion’s hooves. Soon she will be alone again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, this has kind of taken on a life of its own. I have the rest of it plotted out but I have no idea how long it will be since the mountain descent was only supposed to be one chapter and they’re still nowhere close to home. Just know that there is plenty more on the way. Hope y’all are enjoying it!!


	5. Chapter 5

His face is slack with despair. Progress was going so well.

Snow fills the pass ahead like a glove inside a hand. They cannot dig their way through this one: it rises above them in a wall as high as the tallest point of her ice palace, packed into the mountain seam like a vein of white. Above it the sky is taking on the watery tinge that heralds sunset.

“We can climb it,” Hans says doubtfully, but none of the impromptu deliberations committee embrace the suggestion. When they look to the queen expectantly she feels like a rabbit cornered by hounds. She stammers something about agreeing with the prince and makes her escape, face burning. Not very regal, she knows, but they were only deferring to her for the sake of protocol, after all.

They have no choice but to camp there for the night and find an alternate route in the morning. Teams depart to collect wood and any available food. No one is prepared for a night in the snow, and without the most basic camping supplies their fires will need to be hot and long-burning if they do not want to freeze to death in their sleep. Everyone else starts digging—a different performance from the type they have been performing all day, because they are also shoaling up. Crude, shallow trenches materialize in the fading light, meant to keep the wind out and warmth in.

Elsa locates Hans, to whom she has spoken a total of eight words since abandoning him at the cookfire hours earlier, and marches over to him. She holds up her iron-encased hands.

“Take these off of me.”

He frowns. “I am sorry, Your Majesty—”

“I can make shelter for everyone. I cannot with these on. Take them off, take them off,” she says impatiently, wanting her hands busy.

“We have shelter.”

“A pit hardly qualifies as shelter.”

He says: “I can’t risk it,” and he is not referring to the structural integrity of her version of accommodations.

“I want to see my sister,” she reminds him. “I will not leave.”

He looks unconvinced.

“I want to sleep, too,” she tells him. “I’m not going anywhere in the middle of the night. And you have no other options.”

“You are a danger to yourself and others.”

He thinks she might take vengeance for the murder plot. She has no such desire. “How can I harbor hard feelings when I might easily have done the same as they, were someone else the threat? Let me care for my people. Please, Hans.” Her voice breaks on the _please_.

He stares down at her, warring internally. In his eyes she encounters that ever-present watchful care: he is the sort of person who actively looks for gaps to fill, broken places to brace, for no reason beyond innate kindness. Dangerous, that. A person could grow addicted to such specific solicitude. A good trait in a king, though, if she succeeds in abdicating to Anna.

“They go back on when you’re finished.”

“Agreed.”

She seats herself on a fallen pine trunk beside which a healthy campfire burns. He crouches before her, key in his hand. His gloves are long gone, given to a young gendarme who lost his own after removing them to eat.

“Before I do this,” he says, “let’s talk about that snow monster you had guarding your palace. That thing almost knocked me into eternity. You won’t make another one, right?”

She smiles. “I promise.”

The key twists, the iron falls away.

She stares at her bare hands. They seem unfamiliar, these fingers that she has not seen in hours. Anxiety shivers through her. All well and good to make promises, but what difference do words make when she has never been able to restrain her own body? Put the fetters back on, she wants to say. Else what might be unleashed?

Another hand reaches over and covers hers. She starts, unaccustomed to human touch, and stares at the hand. The tips of his fingers are cold but his palm is not.

“You’re warm,” he whispers.

Her eyes fly to his face. His eyes are green, she knows they’re green—but in this light they've turned gray, gray as the deepest part of ice, only there is no coldness to be found.

She pulls back—and regrets it even as her fingers slide away from his, but there is no way to take back his hand or explain that years of habit make her skittish at physical contact, that her heart is beating too fast to trust her control.

“Build your fires where you want to sleep but keep them well apart,” she instructs the men, and waits.

They mutter over their lovingly-built trench but do as told. The campfires are glowing things in the twilight. The glittering snow at the base of the pass throws a golden reflection back over the encampment. When finished the men group themselves at a distance, as ordered.

 _Then:_ she begins.

The cold air on her bare skin is like a caress. She flexes her fingers. Power fills her like a deep, slow intake of oxygen. She spreads her arms in anticipation. It is like falling back into herself.

There it is!—the joy she stepped into when she reached the North Mountain, stripped off her remaining glove, and saw for the first time the magnitude of what exists inside her. To make something from nothing, something _magnificent_ , and know it was all from her—to know she was capable of more than she had ever dreamed, that she might create beauty instead of pain, that this curse she carries might have good purpose; to be free, all physical and mental locks falling away, to let her power expand as far as it might—oh, it goes singing through her body, flowing from her fingers in dazzling patterns of white, and she smiles so wide her cheeks hurt.

She does not make another palace; they are in need of warmth, so the shelters must be small spaces, to trap and hold body heat. What she pulls out of the snow are essentially igloos, nowhere as impressive as her palace of ice, big enough to house three tall men if forced. She has no intention of leaving them rounded and plain, however. No two are the same. The most skilled ice sculptors in Arendelle could not produce the lovely, intricate engravings she weaves across the surface of the ice huts, or carve out the figures she constructs with care and precision. On one, a pod of whales progresses from etchings on the wall into embossings, ending with the largest whale head surfacing from the top of the hut, water shooting from its spout. Another is fashioned to resemble a hunting lodge, complete with log walls and a deer’s head over the entrance. Beside it a riot of tropical plants bend their icy leaves together into a roof that offers entry through an awning of crystal-clear orchids. Hans’ is emblazoned with a sun; its cuts and fractals catch the light of every flame in the camp.

Color has surged back into her world. If she were able, she would see that the gray pallor of her face has gone; she would be amazed at the light in her eyes; she would not recognize herself—and yet she would. Here she is, the best of her, the truth of her.

Had she known it was possible to feel such jubilation she would have run away long ago. _And returned?_ the voice whispers.

She turns, tired and triumphant, to the prince, who has stood behind her since she began. She forgot him in the frenzy of creation, but recognizes him as the reason she could let herself get lost in her work, subconsciously aware of the presence of a safety net; he has stood sentinel, ready to call her back to herself should she go too far.

He smiles at her expression. It catches her off guard—the pride in his eyes. She has not seen that look directed her way since Anna was a child.

“Are you hungry, Your Majesty?”

She answers him with a slow smile. “Lead on, Your Highness, and I will follow.”


	6. Chapter 6

Hans checks on the horses while supper is prepared. Elsa built them an ice stable but there is nothing to feed them. The issue of food frustrates him: in this matter the planner failed to prepare, and she knows each hungry nose that nudges at his hands is a blow to his heart. At least the men can hunt; the horses will go hungry until back home.

The prince takes a minute with each animal, talking to them, rubbing their heads, inviting her to do the same, but she declines—her hands are still bare and she will not risk harming them, not to mention Hans seems to have forgotten about locking her up again and she has no plans to remind him prematurely—until they reach Sitron, who remembers her and gives her a nudge that almost sends her sprawling.

“I could almost think I’m not wanted here,” the queen scolds the stallion, smiling. “Or are you in league with the thugs from Weselton?”

Her companion tenses even as she laughs. Hans keeps the men under constant surveillance, watching them as closely as she has been watching him all day. She refuses to tell him who the most willing participants of the conspiracy were. As a result he suspects everyone, and has attached himself to her like a sword-wielding barnacle.

He does not want vengeance, but he wants justice, and his idea of it involves tying up the conspirators and trying them for treason.

“Surely you don’t expect me to return to a city of people terrified of me and immediately execute twelve of their husbands and fathers.”

“Any man who can so easily be persuaded to commit high treason is a high risk!”

“They were frightened. They were not thinking rationally. They didn’t know where else to turn.”

Her own words ring strangely in her ears. There is something to discover in them, an answer that slides in like a matching piece in a puzzle, but he speaks and she loses it.

“Stubborn but loving.”

“What?”

“I’m making a list.” He crosses his arms. “Here I’ve been wishing you would be more trusting. Little did I know I am the _only_ person you don’t trust!”

She does not bother to answer that. He is angry at more than just the conspirators. There is plenty of wrath left over for her: that she is in favor of mercy over punishment, which will do nothing to stamp out the danger to her; irrationally, that she would take the men back into her heart (they are her people, after all) when she has done her best to keep him at arm’s length all day. But most is reserved for himself: that he was not there from the start, that he did not prevent the entire tableau from playing out as far as it did.

He does want revenge, she realizes. Where the hair splits is that he does not intend for her to involve herself in it, but he means to take it for her. She cannot imagine why. She wonders if he would be a vindictive ruler.

He does not look vindictive now, the red head in his hands turned to gold in the torchlight.

She says, “We have never had an outpost on the North Mountain. Such a thing would be impossible to build. But now there is a fortress there.”

The look he gives her is one of impatience: why is she trying to change the subject?

She continues, “The men with us are already familiar with the area.”

He stares at her. “The first unit assigned to the post,” he says slowly, “would, ideally, be familiar with the area.”

“Ideally.”

For a while he says nothing. Then:

“At least scream next time,” he tells her.

Shamefaced and spellbound, the men welcome her into the circle. Wariness has evolved into wonder. They seem thoroughly chastened. By the end of the evening most have apologized to her for being silent observers if not having direct involvement in the attack, or for their disloyalty to their beautiful, kind-hearted queen. They are pleased with the ice huts. No other queen could have done so much for them, they tell each other.

An odd reciprocity is being played out; a balance must be struck somewhere between the violence they displayed and the benevolence she did. She wonders what the result will be.

The foraging team was fortunate in their hunting efforts. Nothing is left when supper is finished, but every belly is swollen with meat and each face glows with contentment. She has never eaten freshly-caught fish roasted over an outdoor fire, or burned her fingertips on rabbit grease when trying to pull meat off the spit, or sat among a circle of companions and listened to their jokes and reminiscences. An industrious soldier has whittled crude spoons for everyone and they share out of a communal pot—the stew is admittedly flavored with more than a hint of coffee but they are hungry enough for seconds. The night air is freezing and they are massed around the biggest bonfire in the encampment, and the air is warm with much talk and unending laughter.

Having little to contribute in the way of storytelling, she is content to listen to their anecdotes. They draw her out gently, one eye on Hans and one on her hands. Has she ever seen such a contraption?—Does she recall the summer the merfolk surfaced?—Would she have stood her ground or jumped?—But what do her books say about dragons in the wild?

 _They do not fear me when they know me._ She wonders about her reception in Arendelle. To have this group at her back (if the current attitude can be preserved) might sway the people in her favor. She realizes for the first time that she will have to face them, her people, the victims of her curse. She watches ice surge up and coat her spoon as though lying in wait for her full consciousness to return. _Oh, forget, just for now,_ she begs her fingers.

A shout of laughter from Hans distracts her. Someone is giving an account of chasing a flock of chickens across the frozen fjord. The faces around her are creased with mirth, throats choking on food as they attempt to swallow against rising laughter. The southern prince has managed to relax under the combined influences of a full stomach and the knowledge that she will not be clutching traitors to her heart. He catches her notice of him over the fire and his smile broadens, until he glimpses the spoon in her hand. She drops it to the ground and covers it with her skirt before the others see.

Talk of the winter storm trapping their homes naturally turns the conversation to its source. Can she end it? Will she? they want to know.

Every set of eyes is on her. “Such is my intent,” she answers, and it is a queen who speaks to her subjects now; Elsa feels as though she has donned a mask and cowers behind it, but is pleased to note that her voice does not waver. They want to press further, but Hans’ hand drifts casually to rest on his sword hilt and they decide they are satisfied.

Full darkness comes quickly. After a day of digging their way through valleys of snow, the men are exhausted. “We have energy enough for gratitude, though,” they tell her, and she is delighted to learn their thanks will be expressed in the form of a short chorus piece made popular by gypsy performers.

“I never got to see these. They were always performed in the square,” she whispers to Hans, who comprises the other half of the audience despite his obvious wish to join the singers. He smiles at her words and settles beside her on a couch of snow.

The song the men have chosen is from a theatrical, a gratefulness piece typically performed at the end of a bountiful harvest though often sung by performers to spectators at the end of a show as a hat makes its rounds. Tonight the singers stand calf-deep in the snow, their words turned tangible in the freezing air, their hands empty and eyes sincere. They arrange themselves in a half circle and the music begins as a low hum, so faint that at first it does not register as anything but a ringing in her ears that slowly builds in volume until the night is filled with layers of melody.

Sound hits thinly in this open space but somehow the lack of acoustic boundaries serves to clarify every voice so that each one is distinct, merging with the others in a harmony of such detail and loveliness that it brings tears to her eyes. She sits mesmerized by the sounds sailing across the snow, flowing forth like deep bells in their throats, each cadence building on the one before—her breath catching in wonder that she has ears to hear this, that these mere mortals stand before her creating music no instrument of wood, string, skin, or metal could ever produce, that there are so many sources of beauty in the world.

No one wants the evening to end. How strange it is, she thinks while going from campfire to campfire to thank each cluster for their contributions to the performance, that this is how they are closing the night after a day of so much suspicion and unrest—and here she is beside Hans, effortlessly moving through the motions of a companionship she has never before experienced. The men tell her about their families, hobbies, ambitions. They are solid and stalwart at core and her heart swells with pride that such as these comprise good Arendellian stock. She almost regrets her resolution to banish them to the North Mountain, though it only takes one look at the anger burning in the eyes of the trussed-up henchmen from Weselton to restore her resolve.

At some point during the evening a slate-blue overcoat is draped over her shoulders, and she does not need its warmth but she wants the gesture made, she wants the scent of the owner in her nose, she wants the sensation of arms around her; so it stays.

A swath of stars breaks up the black sky on one side; the moon still hides behind the blocked mountain pass. Ribbons of color—green edged with blue, blue shifting to purple, to red—undulate silently above them. Enthused voices gradually quieten; the flickering campfires are encircled by low murmurs and reclining silhouettes. Just once does Hans order everyone to bed, reminding them of what awaits them on the morrow. They groan and throw snowballs at him: the world is ending and they are enjoying themselves, they tell him. She smiles and he concedes.

The low light and occasional intonations from the other campfires encircle her like a warm blanket. Prince and queen sit together in the quiet of the night, the popping fire its only accompaniment, the rest of the world muffled in snow. She is spent but no more inclined to separate herself with sleep than is anyone else.

She asks drowsily, “What happened with your brothers? Did you get your revenge on them for acting like you were invisible?”

He chuckles. “No. Most of us have become good friends, as a matter of fact. Guess it just took some growing up.”

“Oh. That’s good.”

“Hey.” He tips her chin towards him with a finger. “She’ll listen. I’m sure of it.”

They stare at each other until someone blinks and breaks the link.

She tilts her head back to watch the shifting colors in the sky. These lights are like an old friend. There has been so little consistency in her life—years of isolation do not constitute sameness, not in her case, not the way an observer might classify it—and these have been there, year after year, infinitely disinterested in her, impervious to her powers, vast in their existence, in their singular purpose.

“Sky’s awake,” she says softly.

She wonders where Anna is. The large mountaineer looked trustworthy; she hopes her sister is safe and warm. Is Hans thinking the same thing? Will Anna and Hans fall asleep tonight thinking of each other, as her books say lovers are apt to do?

He has been spinning the key in his fingers for—she’s lost track of how much time has passed, now.

“I wish I’d seen the joy that created your ice palace.”

A slow smile blossoms across her face. “Want to see a little more magic before you lock me up again?”

Without waiting for an answer she stretches forth her arms.

Her work on the igloos required large movements, but now all she need do is extend her fingers to set an ice crystal spinning at their tips. It expands, growing the arms and legs and branches of its own distinctive pattern—a smaller replica of the snowflake from her ice palace. Beneath his gaze its edges extend and narrow, transforming into small wings. The icy outlines of a white dragon emerge. It makes a slow circuit of their small ring of light and comes to a halt in the air between them. Neck extended straight up, it breathes out a cloud of fire before stiffening into a miniature tree trunk, the snow-flames becoming a host of leaves. Fruits grow rapidly on the branches—lemons, pale and perfect, grown ripe within the shelter of ice leaves. Leaves dissolve into a cloud of ice bubbles and the lemons swell into fantail goldfish. The fish float lazily, swimming in the air, the firelight glinting off their white scales. Their fins undulate in waves, rippling into the swirling skirts of twelve tiny maidens. The faceless dancers spin in formation until she sends them shooting into the sky, where they burst into white fireworks that drift downward. Snowflakes settle on her hair and Hans’ shoulders.

They both stare at the empty air, transfixed by the memory of the sight (she is not such an old hand as to be immune to the beauty of her own magic) and it is a moment before he manages to say, “It’s breathtaking, Your Majesty.”

“If we are going to be family, you should call me Elsa.”

His eyes flick to hers, startled, and she would not have believed she saw a flash of denial in them were it not for her reaction to it, namely surprise, which she knows she could not feel had she imagined his expression. What is the cause? Not unwillingness to address her informally; he would vocalize his refusal. And the look had been born of alarm, not etiquette. She wants to know—

But then he says “Elsa.” and one would think she had never heard her name spoken before, the way she immediately wants him to say it again.

His eyes are fixed on hers, searching. “You want me to marry Anna?”

“I don’t want it,” she says, and his eyes gleam. “Not yet. You still barely know each other.”

“Don’t you believe in love at first sight?”

“I believe,” she says quietly, “that a lonely heart will wish as simple a thing as sympathy into love.”

He says nothing in response. She stretches her arms toward him and he replaces the fetters, and when all ten fingers are confined once more she stands and bids him goodnight. She goes to the igloo emblazoned with the snowflake from her ice palace, and she does not see his eyes follow her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few Disney shoutouts in this one, did you catch them? :)


	7. Chapter 7

_Elsa ran as fast as she could but she could not shake her pursuer._

_She slammed every door behind her, room after room. No matter how hard she sprinted or rows of locks she turned she could not get ahead. The footsteps were always right behind her, the voice constantly calling to her._

_Each long hall opened to another. She was in the castle, so each one differed from the next, but none of the ornate decorations were familiar. She was in a house she ought to know but did not. That was hardly the problem at hand, however._

_Anna trailed Elsa through the halls, her steps never quicker than the happy trot of the child she was. Elsa could not see her sister but her voice was never more than a room behind, no matter how fast Elsa ran._

**_We can do this together. Together, Elsa._ **

_Elsa ran faster, hurled the doors closed, stumbled in her haste. Her skirt was too long but she must not ruin her dress; the coronation was tonight._

_**We can beat the monster together** , called Anna, tiny, pigtailed Anna, the white streak in her hair newly acquired._

_Elsa did not know where the monster was, only that it was somewhere in the castle. She could hardly twist the door handles open for panic; the adrenaline was nearly paralyzing._

_**Go away** , she screamed to her sister. She could not protect Anna if the monster found them because Anna could not know about her powers._

_**I understand** , Anna said. **You don’t have to be afraid. I am right here. We can fix this together.**_

*

Elsa wakes to a glow of white. A pleasant scent teases her nostrils, too faint to get a good sense of until she rolls over and her face connects with the source. Hans’ greatcoat is still wrapped around her. A smile curves her mouth and she inhales deeply.

Her eyes fly open. What is she doing?

She climbs out of the ice hut, dragging the coat after her. The dawn colors are at their peak, tinting the clouds gold and rose and tangerine. The igloos look like golden bumps across the landscape. She sucks in the cold morning air and stretches.

Snow fell during the night, though there is no way to know whether she or nature is to blame. She looks at the unmarked powder, an even layer of glistening white making everything clean and beautiful. You could be this, it seems to say. You could start anew.

She watches the men slowly emerge from their small white huts and stretch their arms wide, rubbing their limbs and jumping up and down for warmth. Their puffing breaths are visible, floating from their mouths as they greet each other in the subdued tones of the just-awoken, moving to tend to the horses and prepare them for the new day.

Somewhere unseen, Hans is singing an old iceman labor tune. The sound is deep and steady and warm. Elsa remembers Anna singing in the hallway outside her bedroom door, her voice clear and strong, growing louder and fainter as she marched to and fro on whatever boredom-slaying errand she was running. He sings. That’s good, Anna likes to sing.

She follows the sound to the source and finds him sharpening ice picks in preparation for the day’s labors. He smiles a welcome up at her.

“How did you sleep?”

“I had a nightmare,” she replies, distracted by the smell of something cooking, “but I don’t remember any of it.”

“I dreamt I would only be permitted to attend your coronation if I ate all the chocolate fondue at the dessert table.”

“If you’re going to talk about food, that had better be eggs I smell.”

Other voices have joined Hans’ song and carry it forward. The men’s voices are thin in the open air but boisterous nonetheless, greeting the morning with enthusiasm. He has certainly set the tone for the day.

“How’s your head?”

She touches her hair. “No white streaks.”

“Any dizziness?”

“No.”

“The first thing you need when we arrive at the castle is to be examined by a real doctor. I’ve made sure the men know there is to be no delay.”

“Very thoughtful of you, Your Highness.”

He gives her a baleful look. She waits for him to mention his eagerness to be reunited with his fiancée.

When he doesn’t, she does. “And then I want to see Anna. Immediately.”

“Of course.”

There will be no bumpy sleigh ride today: the wood used to make it was used to fuel the previous night’s fires. Beneath the powder dusting it, the upper layer of snow froze overnight and offers a steadier surface than the drifts they had to plow through all day yesterday. It bodes well for the pace of their travel, once they can get beyond this blocked pass.

The eggs were found frozen in a nest. She cannot eat a mouthful. “I killed them,” she tells the prince, who looks at her like she has lost her mind.

A shout goes up from behind one of the igloos. “Gone,” someone yells. Sounds of confusion follow—feet running, raised voices, questions and protests and orders. Elsa and Hans stand motionless, waiting to learn what has caused the alarm.

“Where is the queen?” a voice bellows, and they call in response.

A soldier runs to them, speaking breathlessly. “Your Majesty, Prince… The plotters from Weselton have escaped.”

“ _How?_ ”

“Broke the manacles. Last night was cold enough to freeze iron—they could have done it with a block of ice. It must have been before the snow fell; there are no footprints to follow. They took their weapons. We’re checking supply inventory now.”

“Where were the guards?”

The man looks uncomfortable. “No one seems to know who was meant to be on duty, sir.”

The prince breathes hard through his teeth. “Is the tracker awake? Bring him to us. Hurry!”

The soldier leaves at a run. Hans paces back and forth, his boots punching down the snow, coat forgotten next to the breakfast cookfire. He turns to her.

“Hold out your hands.” She complies. “I don’t want you to be defenseless,” he says grimly, reaching to unlock them.

She pulls back. “No. I’ll hurt someone.”

“Have a little faith in yourself. You were free for hours last night.”

She reminds him of the spoon. “Anything could happen,” she tells him, and he is unhappy but cannot disagree.

Even fettered, she is not afraid of the assassins. They are long gone. If they had any interest in hurting her, it would have been an easy thing to crawl into her igloo and paint the walls with blood. Nor does she blame the guards; who could have stayed awake after the day they had? Hans is overreacting; she would rather begin digging through the pass. Arendelle cannot be more than an hour or two away. She wonders if she would be able to shift the snow. Perhaps she should have him unlock her after all.

But it is such a relief to not have to impose her own restraint, to be able to feel _anything_ and know she is physically prevented from hurting someone. There is peace within restriction.

A third of the group splits off to search for the assassins. “I will remain with the queen,” Hans decides, giving orders for status reports via flare.

The remainder begin work on the wall of snow. There is too much to move or tunnel through, so they will be doing a version of what she had privately mused over the day before: building a set of stairs and crossing at the top. The snow is packed reassuringly tight, which means it can be dug into and not slide away beneath human weight. Their intent is to build a series of plateaus and climb to each (or haul up, in the case of the horses) via rope and peg. But to build such a ziggurat they must first displace the snow from the top down, which means scaling the wall and displacing the snow without causing an avalanche.

The hired mountaineer was able to give them an idea of the length of the pass. With the whole group laboring and no more impediments between here and Arendelle, they would be home in time for supper; at this altered rate it is impossible to say.

There is little Elsa can do with her hands confined. She sets herself up as a watchman of sorts: monitoring the effectiveness of their chosen climbing routes, watching for dangerous gaps or shifts in the snow, calling directions to the climbers who are too close to see their development or destination.

After a while she realizes she has a watchman of her own. She says, “You’re hovering.”

He growls and stalks off.

The prince’s snow displacement plan involves shooting crossbow shafts at the higher points to force small, controlled avalanches that leave upper sections clear for them to carve away into plateau-steps. He and a gendarme labor at this, constructing grounded holsters that are a cross between a cannon and a catapult, though he spends a good amount of time scanning the horizon too.

They have not been at the work long—half an hour, perhaps—when a panicked whinnying goes up from the stable. Every head on the ground or in the air swivels around. Something about it looks wrong. Is it— _melting?_

She catches the movement of a burgundy coat at the entrance. A faint stream of smoke floats out of the doorway.

Someone cries, “They’re inside!”

The men drop their tools and run toward the stable. They might be able to keep it from collapsing, but they cannot refreeze it into a sound structure.

She finds Hans. “I can help!”

“ _Stay here_ ,” the prince tells her and takes off at a sprint.

She watches anxiously. With the exception of the ones the searchers are using, all the horses are still in the stable. So many large bodies producing heat in a confined space has made it warmer inside than out, even with walls made of ice, and it was thought that they would be more comfortable there as they were not needed yet in the digging efforts. Half-melted patches will make the walls vulnerable to kicking horseshoes and lunging shoulders; if a wall or the roof caves in, both men and horses will be struck with blocks of ice or trapped in the chaos of trampling hooves.

She has hardly given a thought to the escaped assassins—Hans will catch them and truss them up again, of course he will—when there is a flash of pain at the back of her neck. Heavy breathing in her ear, the jab of the arrow tip, ah, how could she have been so stupid as to disregard this threat? And she thinks how clever of them to choose the stables: Sitron is the only thing that could have lured Hans from her side. She will not underestimate them again.

“Well, well. A little snowflake, left out in the cold.”

She is still facing the stables and sees now that the coat they thought was worn by an escapee is simply hanging inside the doorway, swinging slightly. The men are focused on the threat before them; no one is looking back at her. She takes a breath to scream for Hans.

The man behind her jerks her head back by her braid. “Do you see where my comrade’s bow is aimed?”

Her eyes fall on the other assassin; he is tucked into a tall pine tree at a point between her and the stable, and he is sighting down the prince. She closes her mouth.

“Come along quietly.”

She obeys with steadily mounting rage. He pulls her forward without any gentleness; she uses her hindered balance as a cover to stumble as often as possible so that she might look back without his noticing. She waits until the mass of men reaches the stable and the blur of copper red she tracks has vanished inside. Then—

Freezing the manacles causes her captor’s grip on her wrist to loosen. Twisting out of his grasp, she heaves her arm in an arc and smashes him in the face with her iron fist. Stunned, he stumbles back, hands automatically reaching for his nose, which gushes blood like a broken pipe all over the snow. She lands another blow—weaker than the first, but effective. He drops his crossbow. She smashes that too. Then she runs.

“ _HANS!_ ” she screams.

She reaches the igloos before the injured henchman can recover and crouches behind one, listening hard for footsteps. Nothing offers itself up as a weapon, especially one she can wield without the use of her hands. Her only hope is to stay free until Hans comes to her aid. She cannot scream for help again without the henchmen locating her; she cannot tell if her first cry was heard over the chaos in the stable. Too soon she hears the crunch of feet in the snow and the hard, grunting breaths of her pursuer.

“Where are you?” comes a snarl.

Soon the other henchman joins his comrade. The queen stays hidden as long as she dares, then creeps her way around the hut; but moving silently over the snow is almost impossible. Every footstep and breath she takes is amplified in the still air. She feels almost betrayed.

The three of them dart in and out and around like two cats and a mouse racing through a maze, catching glimpses of each other before vanishing again to emerge on another side. Elsa curses the fact that the stable is at opposite end of the clutch of igloos from herself. If she abandons the cover the huts provide and runs into the open toward the stable, she knows she will feel an arrow in her back before she has gone ten steps. They may be all going in circles but the henchmen have managed to keep her contained to this end, severed from her forces.

The soldier said the iron of their manacles had broken when struck by ice. Well, she can certainly do better than that.

An arrow thuds into the ice wall so close to her temple that the rod vibrates against her skin. She takes to her heels, only to discover that they have cornered her: one on her right, another on her left, and the solid wall of an ice hut blocking her path. She looks fearfully over her shoulder at them.

They advance slowly. The one who caught her earlier has broken off one of the antlers from the deer’s head on the ice hut she made and hefts it like a club; the other aims his loaded crossbow; both antler and arrow tips are sharp as knives.

She turns toward them fully and smiles.

They see her free hands and their faces go ashen. Before they can react, she hits them with a blast of stormy winter weather that jolts both of them through the air like missiles. One lands hard atop an ice hut and grips his head, stupefied; the other lands right next to Hans’ contraption, which stands loaded and waiting.

He scrambles to his knees and fires it, but he is sloppy in his rush to regain the offensive stance. The javelin flies through the air without coming near her; it does, however, hit its original target: the ice wall.

“Too low!” comes an urgent shout.

She looks over to see Hans and Arendellians running toward them. Relief washes over her, only to be immediately stilled by the horrifying sound of splintering ice. The javelin has broken into the base of the wall. A mighty crack shoots up through the compacted snow. Everyone stands paralyzed, waiting to see if the wall will give way.

When nothing collapses, all bodies spring to action.

The assassin by the cannon-catapult grabs another javelin and reloads. He aims more carefully this time. She throws a blast of ice at him but it falls short. He fires, and the ice hut next to her explodes into shards of ice. He reloads, but before he can launch another Hans tackles him. They wrestle, floundering in the snow, each trying to choke the other into submission.

Elsa and the other assassin perform their own dance around the ice huts. He has managed to get his hands on a sword, presumably dropped in the panic over the horses, and he expertly deflects her blasts with the flat side of the blade as a shield. His energy is seemingly endless. Whenever she pauses for breath he is sure to be there, sword falling toward her head, wrathful fire in his eyes.

Pulling her power into a central place within, shaping it, expelling it: she falls into it—no, it rises to meet her. She can feel herself losing her edges, blending with the ice, all movements born of instinct.

The other assassin gets away from Hans and retrieves his crossbow. Arrows ping off the walls of the ice huts around her. A swinging sword from one side, arrows from the other—their attack is exhausting to ward off. They are relentless.

Enough of this.

She gathers her power, weaving it into a mass between her hands, letting it expand and strengthen. Then she lifts it—this mass of cold, clear, beautiful, _angry_ power, as easy as lifting a feather—and hurls it at them.

She misses.

They throw themselves to the ground and she misses.

It soars over them and she misses.

The wall of snow lodged in the mountain pass, their silent observer, their barricade: this is what she hits.

Shards of ice ricochet down and everyone raises their arms to shield their heads. A sound like a shot rings through the air. They straighten and stand bewildered as it happens again, again, again. A creaking sound fills the air.

“It’s going to fall!” Hans shouts. “Get to safety!”

The wall starts to collapse. Elsa cannot help but stare: it is like watching clouds descend to earth.

The men are shouting, fleeing, trying to mount their horses. She is thrown back into herself like whiplash. Here is the old familiar sensation: fear spreading through her body. Look what she has done.

The first mass of snow hits the ground and begins rolling toward them like a wave. They aren’t going to make it. She looks around frantically, searching for a way to save them. She can save them. She _must_ save them.

Then she knows how.

After what happened to Anna she swore she would never do it again, but the other option is watching the snow swallow them, so she’s willing to take a chance. She aims carefully, trying to ignore the rumbling growing louder by the second. The ground shakes beneath her feet and throws off her balance and her aim, and she must focus, _she must focus_ or they’ll die, he’ll die.

She tries to recreate the thick, soaring ice of her ice palace, and cannot. That was produced by joy—her elation grew that palace, and right now all she feels is fear that will soon give way to panic. If she panics she will spear them through the hearts instead of carrying them into the sky. “Focus!” She grits her teeth.

They shout with surprise and fear as the snow beneath their feet rises. “Jump!” she screams over the noise. A series of snow peaks springs up before them, providing a curving path to the high rock walls of the mountain pass where shelter and safety may be secured.

Thankfully they understand and obey. They race the snow, running almost into the arms of the collapsing pass, and she wills her strength into their muscles. She knows one bright moment of relief: they will make it. Then a chunk of snow, hard and sharp as a rock, strikes her cheek. The avalanche is nearly upon her.

She tries to push it back as she runs, blasting it away with one hand while the other ices the snow at her feet in order to speed her steps. She pulls the snow on the ground upwards, urging it to lift her, to carry her ahead of the avalanche’s reach. But she is only human, after all, too small and slow to battle roaring nature and hope to triumph. She thinks it horribly fitting: live by ice, die by ice.

“Elsa!” shouts a frantic voice, and the world goes white.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Film: Hans walks into Elsa’s cell. Be still my heart! Surely now those latent sparks will fly. But they still couldn't give me that, could they.

**PART 2: Arendelle**

The prince is desperate; it has been almost an hour since they watched the snow sweep over her and still they have found nothing. The hired mountain guide, finally returning with the search party, is able to give them a general idea of where the avalanche’s trajectory might have carried her—but it is all guesswork, really, who could be accurate in the midst of all this, meager humans against the mighty forces of nature?

Thankfully gravity has carried the snow away from them; though the initial collapse hit the mountain base, the rest swept out of the other end of the pass, down the mountain. There are two positives to this: the first is that the pass is clear enough to traverse; the other is that the depth of the snow trapping Elsa is a fraction of what it could have been, at which they would not have bothered to search.

They uncover a smooth, curved surface and it takes them a moment to realize the orb is not an upended ice hut. They shatter it and find the rest intact; bless her, she had time to shelter herself before the avalanche overcame her, her body was not crushed, she had this bit of oxygen—but it is almost too much to hope she is not frozen solid. She almost blends in with the ice, all that blue and white, but when they pull her out her lips are still pink, her lips are _pink_ , she is alive, _she’s alive,_ he shouts it to the sky. The men are overwhelmed with relief as well, though perhaps not for the same reasons; it would be tragically ironic if the queen were to now die accidentally.

They handle her gingerly, the prince as though she is made of ice that might shatter at the slightest gust of wind, the men as though the slightest touch might turn them to ice. As it happens, her survival re-instills much of the fear that has crept with wariness out of the men’s hearts. The final leg of their return to Arendelle is spent vigilantly watching the queen for any sign of consciousness, but to the men it is hardly based in concern; they want to settle her fate before she wakes. The prince cradles her against his chest atop Sitron and does not join in the debate.

One of the first things Hans does upon returning is lock up the Duke of Weselton. The conspirator does not go without a struggle; for a small, aging man he is remarkably agile, and gets in a few good hits before they stuff him into one of the freezing underground prison cells of Arendelle castle. He screams at them of broken alliances and war and bloodshed, which Hans and the Arendellian guardsmen do not dignify with a reply.

One of the last things Hans does upon returning, to his great repugnance, is lock up the queen. In her cell they bolt manacles of heavier iron, and he holds out her hands to be shackled to the floor. He would sit beside her, only the cell is unbearably cold, and her body seems to radiate cold; so he sits beside the brazier in the corridor outside with an ear cocked for the slightest sound of movement. He falls asleep waiting for her to wake.

*

Elsa wakes to the hard surface beneath her pressing sharply into her shoulder blade. Upon opening her eyes they fill with a blur of gray that makes her remember that she is trapped inside the snow path of the avalanche. The idea that follows is worse: that she has lost her sight. The relief at realizing both notions are incorrect is banked by the comprehension of her true circumstances.

Light filters through the cell window and she runs to it before being jerked to a halt that jars her teeth nearly out of her mouth. Her hands are confined, the chain embedded in the floor; no surprise there. She cranes her neck, trying to see through the frost on the glass.

The sight outside is both better and worse than she expected; part of her thought to find the city buried in snow up to the rooftops, but such a coating of ice is as effective a shackle to the city as these upgraded manacles are to her. They are frozen in place—still breathing, but for how long? How will they eat? _What have I done?_

Her contusion from the ice palace has worsened. She can feel every pump of blood her heart sends to her head. The world rotates rapidly and turns to a blur before her eyes. She does not know where the ground is or where to put her arms for balance. _I’m so tired of falling,_ she thinks; but before she pitches forward, strong hands steady her.

He has set a lantern by the door. His greatcoat is gone—was it swallowed by the avalanche, she wonders irrelevantly—and in the light from the window she can see grey circles under his eyes, standing out against the freckles.

“You should sit down.”

She pulls away from him. “ _Imprisoned?_ ”

“This is only temporary.” His jaw clenches as though he regrets the words.

“Until when?”

“Until more comfortable accommodations can be procured.”

A padded cell, then.

“They already exist,” she says bitterly. “My suite of rooms—this whole _castle_ has excelled in that purpose since I was a child.”

“The council just wants to keep Arendelle safe until the situation is stabilized. Isn’t that what you want?”

She glares at him. “Of course I want it. That’s why I ran. I _wanted_ to be left on the mountain where I was. I got away, Hans! I was _gone_ , alone, I couldn’t hurt anyone! And you brought me back!”

His nostrils flare. “Do you think I wanted this?”

“I don’t know what you want.” Her suspicions hurt; to examine them head on feels akin to stepping into darkness. “ _I_ want to see my sister.”

He does not move.

“Get Anna!”

“Anna has not returned.”

She frowns in confusion. Anna must be here; everything rests on Anna being here.

He says: “The decree of the Council is that you will be released when you have reversed the winter. They are giving you one day before they appoint Anna regent.”

“ ‘They’? Last I heard, _you_ lead the council meetings.”

“Elsa, I am doing the best I can here! Every choice I’ve made is for the safety and well-being of the people, just until you get all— _this_ —under control.”

“You sound just like my father! Are you going to lock me away for the rest of my life, like he wanted to do?”

He bursts, “The other option was putting you to death, and I couldn't let them kill you!”

She is frightened.

“Let me go,” she begs. “Just let me go. Maybe the North Mountain was too close in vicinity to the city, maybe I need to be farther away, the ice will thaw when I’m gone—”

“Yes,” he says bitterly. “Your favorite method of solving a problem: run away.”

“You’ll be king, you’ll rule with Anna.”

Something flickers across his face—desperation? it is gone before she can register the look—and he says quietly, “I will not.”

“ _Please_ , Hans.”

“You created this problem, Elsa. You are the only one who can fix it.” His eyes plead with her. “Just stop the winter. Bring back summer. Please.”

“Don’t you see? I _can’t!_ ”

“Let me help you.”

“No one can do that!”

“Surely a wizard—a healer— _someone_ must have had an idea at some point.”

“No one knew, remember?”

“I still don’t understand. Why did you hide it?” He grips her by the elbows, frustrated. “Look at what has happened because of the secrecy.”

“I told you. My lack of control—The harm I might have caused—”

“That doesn’t mean you had to lie. People could have known why they were kept separate from you.”

“Anna couldn’t know.”

“Anna should have been the first to know!”

Breathing in, breathing out. Just like a morning ago… only this time they are worlds apart and moving further away, and this time Anna is the point of severance, not the link.

She realizes she can see his breath.

What are they going to do?

Until Anna returns, all that matters right now is her people. “Tell me you sent emissaries to all our neighboring ports for provisions and assistance.”

“Of course,” he says stiffly.

“And?”

“The messenger birds have been busy. Aid is promised and forthcoming.” A sudden grin lights his face so vividly that her breath stops in her lungs. “You picked an excellent time to stage a crisis, Your Majesty. All the foreign diplomats trapped in the city are eager not to starve or freeze to death. They have sworn the services of their homelands to Arendelle.”

“I want the full picture. What are our main points of vulnerability?”

“What you might expect…”

And so they talk shop. The soldiers mentioned his preparations for expected consequences from when Anna made him her substitute. What is his progress? What is he doing to find her sister? Who is now ruling in Anna’s stead, and so in Elsa’s? She thinks: _I want to be outside, seeing this for myself. I want to be handing out bread with my own hands. I want to offer comfort and assurance, as a—queen ought?_ She shies away from the thought.

“How far does the winter stretch? Dispatch surveyors to determine the width and breadth.”

He scowls. “This wouldn't be part of a plan to remove yourself to beyond its bounds, would it?”

“Of course it is.” She steers them back to logistics. “We need to free up a battleship. Send out the ice men to carve one loose. I don’t want a path through the fjord, but I want a ship prepared for anything unpleasant that might come to visit.”

Hans steps closer to her. “Would you really leave?” His voice is low.

Despite everything, her heartbeat accelerates. She pushes down an irrational hope. Why should her presence or absence matter to him? He will have Anna. But the look in his eyes—

“Yes. And never come back.” She hardens her tone and meets his gaze directly. It is the truth.

“Sounds lonely.”

“I am accustomed to isolation.”

He scowls. “You can’t shut people out your entire life, Elsa!”

“Watch me!”

“People support each other. You don’t have to be alone in this. Let me help you. Let Anna. We can figure this out—”

“What power do you have to stop this winter? To stop me?” It comes crashing back. The warmth of performing her duty, be it from inside a prison cell, shatters. Who is she kidding? “All these years… You couldn’t possibly understand. You’re completely ordinary!—In the best way, of course,” she adds, hating herself for the hurt that lances through his eyes. “Just—take care of my sister.”

Her manacles have iced over.

He reaches for her. “Elsa.”

She recoils, afraid of inadvertently breaking through the manacles and hurting him. “I’ve told you over and _over_ again to stay away!”

He drops his hand; she collects herself. She is still a queen, be it for one day more. A queen holds her head high.

“I cannot do what the council requires. There is no way to end this winter; the best anyone can hope for is a thaw when I am too distant to sustain the ice and snow, a solution which requires my immediate release and relocation. Tell them.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

She watches him walk away, willing him to come back and insist she is wrong: there is a cure, after all; he knows the words to break the spell. He picks up the lantern and goes through the door without a backward glance. The lock tumbles into place. His footsteps fade.

Elsa stands unmoving in the center of the cell. She can feel the space getting smaller. Wishing she could pace, she sinks to her knees and presses the manacles to her head.

“Don’t feel, don’t _feel_ , I don’t _care_ , it doesn’t MATTER!”

In truth she does not want to leave. Despite her earlier words, the trip down the mountain gave her a taste for the company of others; she had never dreamt there could be so much variety amongst the human race as compressed into hardly a score of individuals. Ire courses through her, directed at her powers—there is so much they have kept her from experiencing and discovering, starting with the wonder of her own people. If she were to stay, that would be her starting point: discovering who it is exactly that live hardly a stone’s throw away.

Anna will be queen instead and it will fall to her to love her neighbors. Elsa counts the seconds leading to her sister’s return. Anna will not stand for her imprisonment for a moment, she knows; nor will Anna let her go so easily as she would like to imagine. Best to have an argument prepared.

After a while she becomes aware of a scratching sound at the cell door. There is nothing elegant about the noise, no clean sound of a key moving effortlessly through the motions of turning the weights inside the lock. Eventually the bolt turns in the keyhole.

 _Hans_. He is breaking her out!

Help me. I’ll let you, she is ready to say. I want you to. I didn’t think there was a way to escape from myself, but you have made me see so many other things differently that maybe you can find something no one else can.

The figure who walks through the doorway is not Hans. Neither is the one who follows.

She is disgusted to see Arendellian-forged swords in their hands. They have either pillaged the armory or subdued the prison guards. She prays it is the former. “Miss us?” one sneers—the one whose arrow destroyed her ice chandelier, who later sat in a tree and aimed that same crossbow at Hans. She knows she ought not wish they had been killed in the avalanche, but it has been a long day.

She is powerless against them with her hands confined, so she stands silent and watchful as they circle her like vultures. The larger one examines her improved manacles. She notes with satisfaction the welt and bruising on his face from where she hit him that morning. The other limps slightly.

“We can do this the hard way…”

“…Or the dead way.”

“Bring back summer. Now!”

Her voice is impressively calm. “I am unable to do so.”

The larger one lays the edge of his sword against her neck. He is deadly serious when he tells her, “Either winter ends or you do. One way or another we’ll get what we want.”

She cries desperately, “Why do you _care_? This isn’t your home; why don’t you just leave?”

“We are only doing what needs to be done.”

“Surely you understand.”

“It is for the best.”

Panic rears its head. “I can’t stop the winter. I have tried to control my powers. I don’t know how!”

“In that case, prepare for your execution, Snow Queen.”

The pure injustice and ignorance of it angers her. “Do you think the ice is something alive inside of me? You’re wrong! It can’t be killed, it won’t melt! Kill me and this will be my eternal legacy: Arendelle frozen in time!”

“It can melt a little bit. We tested it when you left.” He lines up his sword against her neck for the killing blow.

The other chuckles. “Don’t forget—I want a hand for a trophy.”

She glares at him. “Which one?” And with hardly any effort at all she blasts open the manacles. “Take your pick!” She aims both at him and hits him with a sheet of ice that seals him to the wall. He breaks through easily, but by the time his legs are free she is already in the corridor, having frozen the feet of his cohort to the floor.

She slams the door closed and turns the key. They roar with rage, throwing themselves against the door with such force that the wood buckles. She coats the handle and lock in thick, shining ice. It buys her precious minutes, if that—they are already attempting to hack apart the door with their swords.

Where to go, what to do? Anna is not here. The council considered executing their own queen. She thinks of Hans, but cannot afford the time it will take to search for him.

The library. She has scoured every page of those books, looking for answers to the riddle of her ice, and has failed to unearth anything of value, but there is a new hope in her heart. Every problem has a solution, does it not? Every lock has a key. Surely there is an answer _somewhere_.

She sprints through the castle. Winter is as present inside as out; even the air seems crystallized. The palace has never been lively, but now it is deserted. Everyone is huddled away, staying warm inside rooms that don’t require much fuel to keep heated.

She flings doors shut as she passes through one corridor after another, attempting to stall the henchmen with barricades, meager though they may be. Her nightmare rushes back to her. There is a monster in the castle.

This time she freezes the door handles behind her. She hopes they are not clever enough to realize the ice marks her path and instead attribute it to state of the frozen castle; but if they follow her icy prints, so be it, she thinks grimly. She will simply have to cordon off the library with a bit more bite.

She slows as she reaches the upper halls. This is where people will be moving about, if they choose to. And yes—voices. Coming around the corner. She flattens herself against the wall behind a pillar.

After a moment she realizes the speakers are inside the library. She recognizes the voice of the Duke of Weselton. Of course his henchmen released him first, then went to her cell; but why would _he_ go elsewhere?

“…inexperienced, reclusive girls…” she hears. “You can do Arendelle more good than they ever will.”

She steps with care, making sure her shoes stay on the plush runner that stretches the length of the corridor.

“You’ll save the kingdom. No one outside the council knows the queen is imprisoned, and no one has to know. Simple, really: marry the princess. And then—the throne. You will be the hero-king of Arendelle. We will support you financially and militarily. Our great alliance will forge a foundation for generations of peace and prosperity. Quite a climb for unlucky number thirteen, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would say.”

She sinks against the wall. It _hurts,_ like she has been struck with arrows, all hitting different places but none missing their target.

The Duke says, “Do you hear that?”

She tenses; but a moment later voices pour into the room from the other end. The council members have arrived for the meeting Hans promised to hold. They do not react to the presence of the scoundrel from Weselton, so presumably he is hiding.

Footsteps behind her herald the arrival of Weselton’s men. Adrenaline jolts her out of her stupefaction. She makes to move forward, into the library—but she cannot go into the library anymore. Everyone within longs for her demise, enemies and allies alike.

She veers left into a crossing corridor and runs as fast as she can. The assassins are much too close behind. She descends into a stairwell that leads outside. They see and follow.

At the other end of the wing Anna bursts into the corridor. Her maids help her to the library doorway. “Hans,” she says. “You have to kiss me. Now!”


	9. Chapter 9

Hans carries the collapsing princess to the settee, shouting for a doctor.

“It won’t make a difference,” she says faintly, but he is heaping more logs on the fire and does not hear her. He stokes the flames with all the practice of two long days spent on the slopes of the mountain, calling for hot water bottles and more blankets, astonished he has to give the orders. The room becomes a flurry of movement, servants rushing to obey, diplomats rushing around aimlessly in a well-meaning but fruitless effort to be useful.

“Hans—”

“Move the couch closer to the fire. Have they found the doctor? We have to get her blood moving.” This last statement is directed at a maid—a long-time castle employee, who begins massaging Anna’s hands and tells the prince apologetically, “She told us to bring her straight to you.”

“Just keep trying to warm her. _Where_ is that doctor?”

“ _Hans_. I don’t need a doctor, I need—”

“ _Anna_. You’re cold as ice! You need medical attention! Check the prison,” he tells a guardsman who has wandered in to see what is causing the commotion. The man complies with satisfying alacrity.

Anna gathers her strength and sits up, speaking just loudly enough that her voice carries through the room. “Everyone except Hans— _out_.”

When they protest, a stubborn look crosses her face. Was the crown overthrown while she was away, or is she still princess of Arendelle? They glance at him; at his tight nod, they unwillingly file out of the room.

“They’ll execute her if they know,” she tells the prince, who stands before her in quiet ire. “Maybe. I don’t know what counts as treason exactly.”

He shakes his head, at a loss to why she is refusing the aid she so desperately needs, and in addition to genuine concern there is a look in his eyes that says _So this is what life with her is like_.

A wave of guilt immediately hits him. He chose this. He was so eager, so greedy, to hold on to what he has found here—people to love him, whom he could love; an entirely different kind of happiness than he had ever experienced—that he grabbed at the first door in he found before it could slip away. It is not her fault he was so foolish. The eyes she fixes on him are so trusting that he cannot meet them.

“Anna, you’re completely frozen—”

“Not yet, but halfway there and gaining,” she says grimly. “My heart is turning to ice.” He looks for the spark of humor that accompanies all of her bad jokes and doesn’t find it. Something is horribly wrong, he realizes, something far worse than Anna spending too much time exposed to the bitter cold. He finds himself looking at her hair, turned bizarrely snow white, and he tries to push away Elsa’s voice ( _right into her head… fell like a stone… streak in her hair_ )—he tries to push away the vision of the red rage in the queen’s eyes as she drove a spear of ice toward the throat of the soldier from Weselton—but the memories only grow clearer.

“What happened?” He knows what Anna will say next and dreads the words.

“When I tried to convince Elsa to come back, she struck me with her powers.”

For a moment he cannot speak. “You said she would never hurt you.”

“I was wrong.” She grimaces and clutches her chest. He leaps to action, pulling the settee so close to the fireplace it is a wonder the upholstery does not burst into flame. He takes her hands in his, trying to rub warmth into them, trying to force her blood to circulate, trying helplessly to slow the death racing toward her.

“Tell me what you want me to do.”

She clutches the cloth of his sleeve. “You have to kiss me. An act of true love is the only thing that will melt the ice inside me.”

“A true love’s kiss.”

She is too weak to lift her head off the pillowed arm of the couch. She nods crookedly. The yearning in her eyes to live is almost the only familiar thing about her; he can practically see the cold sapping her spirit, turning her into a stranger, the ice in her heart taking away everything vivid and lively about her.

“I see. I’m sorry I didn’t listen earlier.”

“Well, your concern on my behalf was very sweet.”

For a reason she cannot fathom he looks ashamed. “Let’s get you well.”

The prince presses his mouth gently to hers. Her lips are cold as stone in January. He leans back to observe the effect. She looks at him patiently, too weary to be eager. He counts—one, two, three breaths. Something should have happened by now. Four, five, six. Her skin stays icy and her hair remains white. They stare at each other.

She says shakily, “Maybe try again?”

He does. Still nothing.

For lack of anything better, he states the obvious. “It didn’t work.”

She says uncertainly: “Which means… you aren’t my true love.”

“And you aren’t mine.”

He notes with relief that she looks perplexed but not heartbroken. Stunned, as well—he was her only possible savior. All that remains is to make her comfortable and warm until the end comes. Knowledge of the fact does not make it any more conceivable: that this bright, vibrant presence will soon be extinguished, torn out of their lives before the day is over.

Unless…

He sinks onto the couch beside her, clutching his head in his hands. Once again. One more consequence. One more victim. Another voice rings in his ears: _I got away! I was gone, **alone** , I couldn’t hurt anyone!_

Anna peers at him. “Are you alright?”

“How could she strike _you_? Of all people!”

“Oh.” She blinks. “Oh, no. It was an accident. She didn’t even know what she’d done.”

He stares at her. “You didn’t tell her?”

“We didn’t realize how bad it was until after she kicked us out.”

“Us?”

“Kristoff and me.”

“Kristoff? Who is—It doesn’t matter. We need to get you to Elsa.”

“Elsa can’t do anything about this. The trolls would have said so.”

“Trolls?”

“They said it had to be True Love.”

“We have to _try_.”

“There’s no time. We won’t make it to the North Mountain before I… I’m…”

“We don’t have to. She’s here.” He admits sheepishly, “Not entirely by choice.”

She gapes at him. “You found Elsa?”

“Not long after you did.”

“She told you I had been there?”

“She told me about you all the way back to Arendelle. She’s been wanting to see you.”

Her eyes are drifting closed but snap open at that. “She has?”

“Don’t go to sleep, Anna.”

“Okay. It just hurts a little.”

“What? Staying awake?”

“Breathing.” Suddenly she sits up. She looks confused and rather hurt. “ _You_ convinced her to come back?” That it stings to be the sister who failed where a near-stranger succeeded is an understatement.

“She had no control over her departure from the ice palace, but she could have left the travel party and she didn’t. She wants to talk to you, Anna. You’re the reason she returned.” He looks eager. “And maybe you’re the key she needs to reverse all that she’s done, the winter, the ice, your heart…”

New determination enters Anna’s face. “Where is she?”

*

Three guardsmen are heaving the sagging form of the doctor up the dungeon steps. Anna grips Hans more tightly—she cannot move quickly, so he is carrying her—and he makes his way carefully down the stone stairwell. Two more figures lie prone on the floor at its base, and at the sight of them Hans breaks into a run.

Anna’s cry of horror solidifies the sight that for a moment seems unreal: Elsa’s cell door destroyed, jagged ice surrounding it. The color drains from Hans’ face. He stands paralyzed until Anna says Elsa is not inside, where is she, what happened?

He settles Anna on the bench in the corridor beside the dungeon’s small fire cauldron and ventures inside to look for any clue as to Elsa’s whereabouts. Ice coats the wall and floor, screaming of her fear and desperation and her desperate attempt to fight back. His fists clench, wishing they were gripped around the throats of the two men he knows are responsible.

“Anna,” he says, his voice breaking with relief. He holds up one of the ruined manacles. “She did this herself. They didn’t take her—she got away.” He looks at what remains of the cell door. “She must have locked them in here. That’s why the wood is hacked to pieces.”

Anna is shivering uncontrollably. “She’s okay,” she gasps. Some of the tension leaves her face.

“We can hope.” He joins her. She looks at him. _What now?_ ask her eyes.

“I swore I would take care of you. I swore I would take care of your people. I promised!” He grits his teeth. “I will fix this! We have to find Elsa. She can reverse everything, I know she can.”

Anna smiles a little lopsidedly. “So do I.”

He starts pacing. “She mentioned—she was talking about going back to the North Mountain. If we follow her—she can’t be too far ahead. We can make it. We’ll get to her in time.” He does not mention how Elsa will thaw Anna’s heart or that she been far from successful in controlling the dangerous side of her powers for as long as he has known her. Anna keeps silent.

Prince and princess make their way back up the stairs and through the castle toward the stables. Anna grows heavier with every step; Hans tries not to think about what that means. He moves as quickly as he can, forcing his panic into adrenaline. He tries not to think about the increasing cold seeping from her body through the fabric of his coat.

“Anna, stay with me.”

“Okay,” she whispers against his neck. Her breath on his skin is a blast of ice that frightens him more than anything has yet.

Faster, faster. Every step brings her that much closer to life or death. _Faster_.

“Hans,” she chokes.

A strange glow comes through the banquet hall windows. The usual scenic fjord tableau has vanished. There is nothing there but a cloud of white.

“Elsa,” they say in unison.

*

He has to set Anna down when they reach the fjord. They test their shoes on the ice and find their footing steady; the snow swirling across its surface prevents it from becoming slick. The storm tears at her cloak and he wishes he could give her his coat, only he knows it will be ripped out of his hands by the wind the moment he takes it off.

“Hold on to me,” he tells her—and then the cloud of snow swells between them and she is gone. He shouts her name and thinks he hears the whisper of his but it swirls around him on the wind that rages like a live thing. There is nothing but blinding snow and wind and ice. He has lost her.


	10. Chapter 10

She is lost. Snowflakes blow into her eyes and stick thickly to her lashes. The wind carries the breath out of her mouth before she has time to inhale. She cannot see anything but a whirl of white and distant hulking shadows that must be stranded ships.

The assassins from Weselton are long gone, and good riddance. They were swallowed up by this, the storm, her blind terror, not any icy blast direct from her hands; but perhaps they will freeze out here and she will have one less worry. She might have blasted them halfway across the castle when they found her outside the library, but she was too disoriented by Hans’ treachery to go on the offense. Flight is Elsa’s default mode, not fight. She does not exactly think on her feet—she simply panics. She is beginning to see how this is a particularly ineffective instinct, as her environment currently bears witness.

Fear clouds her mind and chokes off rational thought. She moves forward instinctively, terrified, unable to think of anything to do except run.

Run, yes, but to where? She has nowhere to go. Even if the storm clears, they will bury her if she returns to Arendelle. She realizes: if she goes back to her ice palace they will know where to find her. That won’t matter, if she makes an army of snow guardians… but she does not want to fight her people, possibly cause their deaths; she does not want to be a source of fear.

In that case she will be running for her life forever. Her council wanted to hang her, her allies sent assassins against her, Hans is a viper in white gloves. There is no one to turn to. She trusts no one but Anna. But Anna is nowhere to be found.

Elsa’s heart constricts. If this is what they are trying to do to her, what might they have done to her sister? There was a man with Anna at the ice palace, a stranger. He had looked harmless, but what do they two know of men? Hans alone is evidence of their poor judgment of character. And one of them is supposed to be queen! Oh, why did she not return with her sister! Why did she not keep her close!

Wherever she goes, she cannot leave Arendelle without being certain of Anna’s safety. Whatever may follow, to do otherwise is not an option.

The last place anyone saw Anna alive was the North Mountain. That is where she will start.

Tumbling snowflakes still curtain the fjord. She shields her eyes from the stinging wind. Trying to make out which ships are around her, she concentrates on remembering the pattern as she observed their arrival from her window. The ship from Corona is directly ahead—it was docked beside the _HMS Mayfair_ —to the south, which means if she can find the battleship she will know in which direction the mountain lay.

She stumbles forward. One step at a time takes her past the Coronese ship, until she is close enough to read the letters painted on the side of its neighbor. _M.S. M_ is all that is legible through the ice, but it is enough of a nametag for her to know where to look for other confirming details among the visible parts of the ship. Now she needs a fixed point to steer her as she makes her way through the storm.

Then, calling through the whiteness: a voice that makes her blood lurch.

“Anna? Stop, don’t move or I’ll lose you!— _Elsa_.”

“You!” How has he found her in this chaos? She cannot even find the edge of the fjord.

He reaches for her. “You’re safe,” he says in a voice that only a short time ago would have set her heart alight—but now her ears burn with the truth. So he _was_ acting the whole time, after all. So easily duped, are you not, Elsa, Queen of Arendelle? It is hardly surprising. She knows nothing of men and she knows nothing of friendship. Such easy prey.

Only Anna matters. She turns away, looking for a landmark beyond the flying snow. “Leave me alone!”

“Elsa?”

“Stop following me!”

“You can’t leave! Your sister is in trouble! Elsa, wait! You can’t leave your people like this!”

The line about Anna is hollow, a lure; she already told him that she must be removed from the vicinity for the sake of her people; she plunges forward.

“Where are you going?” he shouts.

“To find my sister.”

“Anna is here! Come with me and—Elsa, come back! She needs you!”

Oh, the _liar!_ Will he stop at nothing to lock her away again, or worse? Men and friendship, no; what she knows is fear—and fury.

She can feel it crackling through her arms: icy rage, power unfettered—and when it comes surging to her fingertips she does nothing to restrain it. It goes hurtling towards him, one bolt after another, and she flings them behind her at him even as she attempts to lose him in the blizzard and he tries to catch her.

“You’re a liar—an opportunist—manipulative, silver-tongued bastard—I should have known. All those council meetings you led, making sure Arendelle was ‘prepared for anything’—readying your place, widening the gap, to step into and save everyone—right there in front of me—What a fool I am!”

Hans follows her doggedly, arm shielding his face, shouting: “You were _gone_. Anna was _gone_. She left me with the responsibility of caring for all your people in the midst of a catastrophe. I swore to your sister on my honor that I would do as she asked. Was I supposed to leave them freezing and directionless? Would that make you trust me? Who would you have preferred take over? The Duke of Weselton?”

“ _Weselton!_ ” she screams, rounding on him. He actually looks startled. “How long have you been commiserating? No wonder the assassins from Weselton got loose at the mountain pass. Are you the reason they escaped from the dungeons, too?”

Now her fury is reflected in his face. “How could you think that?”

“You’ll do anything you can to keep your white gloves clean, but if you want me dead you’re going to have to do it yourself!”

“Elsa! _What_ are you _talking_ about!”

“I heard you. Unlucky number thirteen. You made an agreement with him!”

“I agreed with his statement,” he corrects her. “It would be— _to some_ —a considerable achievement. But I have never considered myself unlucky.”

She stares at him.

“I told him to go hang,” he clarifies, shouting into the wind.

She breathes rapidly, her hair and dress torn to and fro by the storm. Though she knows very little about people, she is intimately familiar with the appearance of concealment, or attempt thereof, and she cannot find it anywhere about him.

She lowers her arms.

“I’m sorry—I thought—”

But he has already moved on, and the urgency she glimpsed earlier returns to his face. Urgency and fear, though not for himself… and something like dread. “Elsa! There are worse things happening.”

When he tells her Anna is dying she doesn’t feel anything. The numbness spreads out from her heart and fills her body as though she has turned into cotton, to air, to glass, to ash. This is what I’ve been seeking my whole life, some remote part of her thinks. Not to feel. Everything quiet—everything controlled.

Because it is. The world has gone still: falling snow suspended in midair, winds gone silent, creaking ships immobile. His breath is the only sound, so loud in the stillness that it echoes. Her own lungs are paralyzed.

Anna is dying and she does not know how to save her. She cannot save her. Anna is going to die.

Then grief rears up through her as though her heart might rip in two. She falls to her knees and her clenched fists hit the ice like gavels.

Beneath her, the ice cracks. With dizzying speed the line races ahead. It grows long, the ice snapping, creaking, finally screaming against itself as it splits into two shifting walls. The crack widens into a fissure and the widest part bursts open. With a roar like the raging winds, a demon explodes from its depths.

It is as tall as the hulls of the ships surrounding them. Its body is all ice, of course, but its eyes burn like living coals. These it turns on her and emits a wordless scream.

She stares from where she is crouched. Has she _created_ this? Has this been living inside her, is this what she is truly made of? When she is flayed to the bone, to the very essence of herself, _is this what she is truly made of_?

The ring of a sword blade brings her back to the present. She panics. Another monster, another disaster, and she doesn’t know how to undo it or stop it.

The demon picks up an ice boulder the size of an ice sleigh and hurls it at them as easily as throwing a ball. The water in the fissure heaves beneath it. It begins to move toward them, picking up chunks of ice as big as horses and throwing them with breathtaking accuracy. It breaks a path through the frozen shipyard, leaving a trail of ice boulders and a steadily widening fissure in its wake.

It is out of control and she has no power over it. She resorts to the only method she knows: _suppress it, push it down, don’t feel. Make it go away, make it stop, go away go away go away._

Strong hands grab her under her arms and drag her out of the way of an incoming ice missile. Hans’ grip on her wrist is like iron as he pulls her with him and they run from the barrage. They weave across the ice, trying to disorient the demon and simultaneously avoid the craters each crashing boulder creates. When she glances back to see how close it is, she is horrified to realize it has doubled in size. It looks directly into her eyes and screeches. The sound is like steel scraping stone.

“It’s your panic that’s growing it, Elsa,” Hans shouts. “You have to stop being afraid!”

“I can’t turn it off,” she screams back. “I can’t overcome it when everything I fear is _happening!_ ”

The demon breaks the mainmast off the ship beside it and throws it like a javelin. The pointed end crashes into the ice directly ahead of them at a slant and for a moment the sail provides a curtain between them and the monster. The prince stops abruptly. He sheathes his sword, then takes her face in both hands and turns it toward him.

“Elsa.”

Those green eyes: steadying her. Calling her back to herself. Just as they did in the ice palace. Just as they have every day since.

“Look at me. Breathe. Breathe—in, out, watch me—in, out, in, good, there you go. Now. Please turn around and blast thing in the face with an ice bomb before it makes us part of the landscape.”

She closes her eyes and tries to steady her jittery hands. The power that arrives with such ease to terrify her people and harm her loved ones is unreachable now. She grits her teeth. What was the last thing that summoned it? Oh, yes—when she thought Hans a fraud. Anger it is, then. Anger she has in spades.

Elsa thinks about Arendelle—her people, who will now have a monster to battle alongside an unending winter, both gifts from their new queen. She thinks about her own body, how she can’t even feel an emotion to its extreme without causing more destruction.

Power jolts through her palms. She flings the sail canvas aside and heaves a massive silver blast directly at the monster’s head. Shot hits target dead-on, and for a moment the demon is blinded by a mask of ice. It wheels around wildly, shaking its head as though drunk and scrabbling at the constraining ice with pointed blue fingers.

Then it smashes itself in the face with an unbreakable fist. Her ice breaks off in shards, and just like that its red eyes are trained on them again.

“Time to go,” says Hans. He grabs her hand and she grabs her skirt and they run.

She is able to cloak them somewhat, calling up snowflakes to swirl around them and make it difficult to follow their trail. He chooses the path. They veer to and fro across the ice, darting through the gaps between ships and jumping over more cracks in the ice. Ice boulders rain down around them. Some hit the ships, breaking off masts and figureheads or punching holes in decks and sides. Most land on the ice, forming barriers or shields, depending on Hans’ intended route.

Suddenly they swerve. They have managed to put some space between themselves and the golem (it is not a cosmic being, so cannot be called a demon. She knows from whence it came, and is determined to take all the blame of authorship) and they have secured a moment’s rest. They catch their breath against the tilted hull of a merchant vessel.

Cheek to the wood, Hans watches the creature in his peripheral vision from around the hull’s edge. It is unaware of their hiding spot and is stalking and searching parallel to them.

He says: “I knocked the monster at your palace into a chasm, but I have a feeling that isn’t going to work on this one. Or with this geography.”

Elsa says, “We have to keep its attention here. It can’t get into Arendelle.”

“Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

She presses her hands to her temples. What can destroy her ice? She has seen it shatter, so it is destructible. The thugs from Weselton said it could be melted, and she recalls now that they managed to melt part of the stable she built for the horses, though that might take too long in this case. If they can trap the golem, perhaps they can destroy it. But trap it in what? Even she can barely be confined anymore.

She pushes her fists against her eyes. “I should never have returned.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Look what I’ve done. If I were alone—”

“Solitude is not freedom.”

“Not to _you_. I can’t change what I am. I need to be somewhere I can be myself without hurting anyone.”

“But you can, Elsa. Look around you, look what you can do! It’s yourself you’re afraid of, and you know yourself better than anyone—you know how to calm your body. You don’t _have_ to do things like this, it’s not inevitable that anyone will get hurt.”

He is wrong. She barely knows herself at all. The first real glimpse she got was on the mountain when building her ice palace… then nearly murdering the intruders.

“The storm earlier was only meant to be a shield, wasn’t it?” he is saying. “And then it went too far. You just take things to such extremes—”

“Why are you telling me things I already know? When will you give up trying to fix me, Hans, and accept that I’m not fixable?”

“I am trying to fix the _situation_ , not you. The only thing I want to change about you is the part of you that persists in thinking that being unable to control your powers means you aren’t valuable.” He cuts off and tenses. “I lost sight of it.”

Without warning the ship behind them surges into the air. They cover their heads as chunks of ice plummet from the vessel to crash onto the ice below. The golem drops the ship carelessly to the side and makes a swipe for them.

Hans’ sword is out again and manages to take off a fingertip as it swings past. The monster screeches in rage, clutching its hand; then it drops both fists to the ice in a show of fury, shaking the ground and unsettling the snow like a cloud of dust. Elsa nearly shouts with relief: the snow cloaks them long enough for them to dodge behind an ice boulder.

Hans takes a quick look around the edge. “It’s coming,” he breathes.

Uncertain of her aim and unwilling to give away their position, Elsa hurls a blast of ice at a ship behind the golem, mentally apologizing to the ambassador from Ingary.

The distraction works. When the monster turns around to look for the source of the noise they sprint across the ice to the shelter of another foreign ship. They fall to the ground, chests heaving.

“It can lift ships now?” she gasps. “How much larger can it get?”

“That was a merchant vessel, not a battleship,” Hans says uncertainly. “Surely it has a limit.”

A screech fills the air: the golem has realized its prey has vanished again. They hear splintering, and look carefully around the edge of the hull to witness the total destruction of the Ingarian ship beneath huge, wrathful hands of razor-sharp ice.

Hans says, “What the—?”

A snowman wanders into view. It trundles past craters and broken ships, a vision of unruffled calm. The demon pauses and watches it narrowly. The snowman waves to it.

“ _Olaf?_ ”

Lightning-fast, the golem looks up and catches sight of their exposed faces. It roars like iron scraping iron, then heaves a block of ice the size of a rowboat at them.

“Run!” they shout together.

There is a good amount of distance between them and the golem, and it cannot track their path through the ships; but it can follow their path, and hurls ice missiles into their midst without respite. Elsa calls up another mass of snow to shield them, but the golem is so large that it can blow away parts of the cloud in the attempt uncover them. The cloud darkens as she tries to make it more dense.

Eyes up, she shouts warnings to Hans; eyes forward, he shouts directions to her. Her heart races with adrenaline and fear. What happens when they have no more ships to hide behind? How much more energy do they have to run or fight? What if it gets into Arendelle?

They dodge a crater right as a chunk of ice hurtles through the air where Hans’ head was just a moment before. Another falls a few feet ahead of them, and more hit the sides of the ship to their left. The barrage is unceasing; Elsa feels as though she has stepped into a war zone. The wind rises to a roar.

Without warning another shape rushes toward them through the chaos. Advancing through the whirling snow, the figure gains edges and colors: a person riding a reindeer. The pair skid to a stop before the disconcerted queen and prince and the rider jumps down. It is the blond man who was with her sister on the mountain.

An ice boulder plummets out of space and smashes into pieces against the side of the ship. Elsa and Hans duck as shards rain down on them.

“Queen Elsa!” the stranger exclaims. “What happened? Are you okay? Where is Anna?”

“Who are you?” she screams.

He grabs her arm and pulls her out of the way of a plummeting ice missile.

“A friend,” he says firmly.

She looks at him, her chest heaving, the wind clawing at her braid. Her mouth slackens and the devastation in her eyes is not for her surroundings.

“I don’t know where my sister is.”

He looks perplexed by her anguish. He opens his mouth to question her when Hans shouts, “Incoming!” They leap out of the path of a sleigh-sized ice boulder that hits the ice with such force it sends them flying.

“Hans!” she cries, unable to find him in the resulting upheaval.

“Hans?” says the newcomer. “The prince? Why is he here? Why isn’t he with Anna?” He stumbles to his feet, belatedly offering her a hand up. “Prince Hans!” he shouts. “Where is Princess Anna?”

She rushes to the other side of the boulder. The prince is on his hands and knees, stunned; a line of blood makes its way down his temple. “I’ll survive,” he assures her. “We need to keep moving.”

“Not until you tell me where Anna is,” says the blond man fiercely.

“I don’t know where she is. I lost her in the storm.”

Elsa pales. “She’s out here? In the storm, and with _that?_ ”

“I didn’t have a chance to tell you before that thing came to life. Yes, I was bringing her to you. Come on, Elsa, we have to go!”

“Anna is out here somewhere. We have to find her!”

“We can’t help her if we’re dead!” he answers, and grasps her hand in his once more.

Somewhere nearby the golem screams.

“Too late,” says the mountaineer. “That is, unless we hide _inside_ a ship, instead of next to it.”

They all look up at the ship next to them. The mountaineer raises an eyebrow at the queen. “Any chance you can summon up a set of stairs for us to get up there?”

The golem screams again, much too close for comfort.

Elsa says, “I am happy to try but I can’t promise I won’t just create another one of _those!_ ”

He says, “The ladder it is.”

With some well-placed hits of his ice pick and a few sharp tugs, he loosens a rope ladder hanging from the ship’s side. The sailors aboard must have used it to disembark.

Elsa climbs to the rail and looks around. With a gasp she drops back down. The golem is not too far distant, and her blood runs cold to realize she has a clear view of it from the high vantage of the deck; but it is still looking for them on the ice, and does not notice her. She signals to Hans to make his way up slowly.

They watch the mountaineer loop the end of the rope around his reindeer as a makeshift harness, then scramble up the ladder himself. “Ready?” he says, upon reaching the top. “Heave.”

When all four are aboard, they carefully make their way to the hatch, where the mountaineer’s tools make another appearance. He carefully chips the ice away from the hinges. They time the creaking opening of the door to an ice missile crash, then descend into the darkness.

“Quieter,” Hans says, sounding thankful.

“Colder,” says the blond man, pulling his coat tighter.

Elsa waits for her eyes to adjust. Dim light filters in from portholes and poorly illuminates the space. She looks around her with increasing satisfaction. “This is a battleship. Tell me, O Prince of the Southern Isles—what are battleships for?”

“Warfare.”

She raises an eyebrow at him, then looks meaningfully at a wall stacked with crates. He finishes lighting a lantern and joins her. When he reads what is printed on the wood, he smiles. “Blow it up, eh? Not a bad idea, Your Majesty.”

They work fast, the shaking walls of the ship an urgent notification of how close the golem’s search has brought it to their hiding place. A pile of dynamite tied with oil-doused straw begins to grow. The reindeer watches with interest; his contribution to the cause is to lay on the pile of straw they have dumped out of a storage box. The mountaineer watches with arms crossed.

“Care to lend a hand?” snaps Hans.

“It won’t work.”

“How do you know?” Elsa asks, walking past with a crate and a frown.

“Believe me, I know. The thing will fall apart and re-form, that’s all. I’ve been watching Olaf do it for three days.”

Hans mutters, “Not going to ask.”

Elsa’s shoulders tighten and her breath comes faster. “It won’t work? Then what are we supposed to do? How will we destroy it, or find Anna?”

Hans stops and takes hold of her hands. “We’ll figure it out somehow, Elsa. If this doesn’t work, we’ll try something else. But this is all we can do right now—unless you can reverse it.”

She shies away from the hope in his eyes. “Like you said. This is all we can do.” Her stomach is in knots. _Oh, Anna, Anna, Anna_.

For all his reservations, the mountaineer is a kind man and a strong one, and when he sees her struggling to carry a crate of prepped explosives up the stairs he carries them for her.

“Bet you never thought you’d have to deal with this sort of trouble when you signed on to guide my sister,” she says.

“I’m not a guide, I’m an iceman. But you’re right—Anna came with plenty of surprises, although it’s become sort of par for the course by now.”

“I’m sorry,” she tells him. “For all of this.” Someone should get an apology, since her death at the hands of the golem is just as likely as the destruction of Arendelle.

He grins and shrugs. “Who would I be without ice?”

She jumps.

_Who would I be without ice?_

_What is left?_

“We’re ready,” calls Hans from the deck. “As we can be,” he amends, looking from their pile of supplies to the pacing golem.

They crouch at the helm, gauging the distance. Hans loads an explosive into the makeshift catapult he has constructed and lights the straw. They hold their breath as he pulls back and releases. The bomb sails through the air and lodges between the jagged plates of ice that constitute the golem’s right shoulder.

The monster looks at it and—the dynamite explodes. It reels to the side and lurches back and forth, and amid the smoke and flying ice they can see that the arm has been wholly severed. Elsa and Hans smile excitedly at each other. The iceman is silent.

The golem picks up its arm and welds the limb back onto its shoulder. Their smiles die on their faces.

“Do it again,” says Elsa. “Again and again, until it’s all in pieces. _Quickly_.”

The ice demon charges towards them. Hans fires off another explosive and takes out a knee, which gives them time to gather their wits. They fall into a rapid rhythm: the iceman loads a bomb into the catapult; Elsa lights the straw; Hans fires. They hurl full half of the pile of explosives at the monster before it is finally too shattered to put itself back together.

Huge blocks of ice lays scattered across the fjord. Under the dark clouds, it has become a desolate landscape of broken ice and splintered ships.

But all is still. The monster is defeated. Elsa turns to Hans; he smiles tiredly at her.

“Don’t cheer just yet,” mutters the iceman.

All of his earlier naysaying is proved horribly correct. They watch in disbelief as fragments of arm and limb begin rolling together. In only moments the golem stands whole and indestructible once more.

“No,” Elsa moans.

Hans grips her by the shoulders. “We could be fending this thing off all day. Your sister doesn’t have much time. If she has a chance, you’re it.”

“How long can you distract it?”

“Take your time,” the iceman grunts, heaving a crate. He loads the catapult and fires a bomb directly into the golem’s left eye. “I’m unemployed at the moment. I can do this forever.”

At the base of the rope ladder she encounters her first obstacle: a blockade of ice, all boulders and jagged edges. She cannot go the other way or the golem will see her, so she grits her teeth and struggles to climb over the obstruction.

Hans shouts, “Duck, Elsa!” and throws an explosive onto the ice directly ahead of her. It flares and nearly catches her dress. She throws herself backward and covers her face, and when the smoke clears she finds a path blown through the barricade.

She shouts, “You almost set me on fire!”

He says: “But I didn’t.”

She is forced to take a crooked path in order to avoid more barricades as well as being seen by the golem; she does not want to cloak herself in snow in case it has the secondary effect of keeping Anna from seeing her as well. She calls her sister’s name into the wind, certain that the golem cannot hear that, at least; it is fixated on the men aboard the battleship, and its enraged screams are louder than the gale from her earlier storm.

Something moves on the landscape. Elsa squints, wondering if she is imagining things—but there it is again. Hardly visible, white snow against white ice, it is the snowman that passed through earlier. He is between her and the battleship. And behind him, rounding an ice boulder—

“ _Anna!_ ” she cries.

Her sister does not hear her. Even from this distance she can see the blue of Anna’s eyes; they are fastened on the deck above where Hans and the iceman are hurling a barrage of explosives at the golem.

Anna’s feet turn toward the ship. She staggers. Olaf loops her arm around his shoulders. He says something to her and she shakes her head. She points to the men with a hand she can barely lift.

Surely that cannot be her sister, so weak and white. Elsa begins to tremble. She picks up her train and runs through rows of inert ships toward the blur of maroon. It is not too late—hope is not gone—Anna is still alive—still alive—still alive.

Then she stumbles to a halt. Her horrified eyes take in the spectacle the other ships have shielded from her: the golem has reached the battleship. It brings a fist down on the deck with such force that the front of the ship breaks through the ice and stays lodged at a tilt. There are no other signs of life.

Suddenly the reindeer bursts out of the hold, both men on its back. It gallops across the deck beneath the raging eyes of the golem, who raises another fist. With a yell, all three plunge off the side of the ship. Heart hammering, Elsa throws an orb of power toward them and watches in relief as they slide safely down a snowbank. They are on their feet a second later, however, moving away from the ship as fast as the reindeer can carry them.

The whole world explodes in yellow. She is thrown across the ice and comes to a stop only when her body slams into another ship. The air is knocked out of her body and she lies there for a moment, waiting for her lungs to accept oxygen again. A wave of white rolls toward her; she cringes and throws up an ice shield just in time. Boulders and snow surge against it, piling higher and higher—she would have been buried for certain.

Crawling out from behind the debris, she coughs from the smoke in the air. She cannot hear anything but the blood pumping through her head. The muffled world slowly gives way to a sharp ringing in her ears. Planks of wood fall from the sky and clatter onto the ice around her and she realizes the men have exploded the ship.

Where is Hans? _Where is Anna?_

She circles the ship that so gently received her body until she finds a rope ladder. From the stern she is able to take in the whole scene. Anna and Hans are nowhere in sight, though the smoke in the air and the brewing blizzard are not helping matters. The place where the battleship was trapped is now a hole within which still-boiling water roils. Some distance from it, the fissure from which the demon sprang is gaping wide, with many more cracks branching out from the main stem. Her hands fly to her mouth—the iceman and his reindeer are floundering in the water.

Human clings to animal, who swims with all its strength for the edge. It is able to get a foothold, but its master’s hands are frozen past feeling and the man loses his grip. The reindeer scrambles to safety, realizing too late that it has made it out alone.

The iceman struggles to stay above the surface of the water but there is a current beneath the ice and it pulls at him. He bobs up and down until finally his head goes under and does not resurface. He is trapped, now; there is no escape from the grip of the water beneath the thick ice. Even if he is conscious, even if he has the strength to swim, he will run out of oxygen before he can reach the gap.

The reindeer is about to jump back in when a misshapen blob of white rolls past him. Olaf gauges the angle, then dives. Elsa clutches the rail and holds her breath.

On the count of eleven they break the surface. The iceman begins coughing up fjord water immediately. She presses her hands to her forehead in relief.

Olaf was last with Anna; the iceman was last with Hans. She clambers back down the ladder. Every part of her body seems to hurt from her collision with the ship. She has never felt so exhausted in her life.

If she had not made the demon her friends and people would not be one step away from death. If she had not hurt Anna she would never have made the demon. If she hadn’t run away she would not have hurt Anna. If she had not had powers she would never have needed to run away. If she had never been born she would never have had powers; she would never have been able to hurt anyone. Her guilt is so heavy she can barely breathe.

The sound of her name rises over the wind and reaches her ears. Searching for the source, she locates Hans. He must have been thrown much farther out than the other two when the explosion went off.

She is gladder to see him than she has words for, but she cannot seem to move. For him to be alive is a greater gift than she deserves. And it is not even her joy to partake in, is it? He is Anna’s. Anna who is going to die.

Seeing her face, he slows. He starts shaking his head. “Elsa. No, Elsa, you cannot blame yourself for this.”

“Can’t I?” she chokes. “Who would you say deserves the blame, then?”

“What’s the use of blame? It happened; we have to keep moving forward. Don’t be so blinded by your guilt that you lose the chance to find the solution. I know you can overcome this, Elsa. With my whole heart I believe you can.”

“Stop,” she says. “I know you mean well, but _stop_. You have no idea how it feels to spend your life— _every single day_ of it—discouraged by your endless failure and disappointed in yourself for being unable to overcome it. Don’t you think my mind knows that I should be able to do what you’re saying? And when I try, _really try_ with everything I can think of, all that happens every time is that my body— _my own body_ —betrays me. _I can’t do it_. All I can do is _this_.”

She gestures around her at the storm, the demon, the winter she has created, and when she looks back at him the fight in her eyes is gone.

She is tired, and has been for a long time, fueled for years only by fear; she is drained, as though the colors within have faded into transparency and grown thinner and thinner, and the wind might blow through her as easily as though she were a ghost; she is empty. This is the stone wall, the unbreachable mountain, the last hit of the hammer against the nail.

Without warning, the golem shrieks above their heads. It stands as tall as a ship’s mast (it keeps growing, how does it keep _growing?_ ) and when it crashes down on its legs so that it might more easily reach them, the ice shudders so violently it throws them to their knees.

The monster swings a gargantuan arm and backhands Hans across the ice. Elsa screams, scrambling to her feet to run to him. Before she goes three steps the demon’s arm crashes into the ice in front of her, thick as a redwood trunk and just as immovable.

Her mind knows she is supposed to fight but she cannot seem to remember which way to go, or how to protect herself, or how to move her arms or legs. She stares into the monster’s eyes. They blaze red, as though lit from within by the coals of the bonfires from the mountain camp, but the flickering welcome of that night has been replaced by hate.

It _is_ me, she realizes. It is all the self-loathing I have ever felt. It is all the empty rage I have allowed to swallow me.

A blur of purple out of the corner of her eye—and suddenly there is Anna, white-haired and frost-skinned, moving stiffly toward the monster. Before Elsa can react, her sister lifts the straw-wrapped, faintly glowing bundle she clutches like a beacon. She draws her arm back and hurls the bomb. Her form is dismal but thankfully the kneecap she is shooting for is at not-very-distant eye level, and she does not miss. The explosive lodges in the ice of the crook of the golem’s knee.

The she turns around and staggers to Elsa. She grabs her hand. “Fire in the hole!”

The dynamite explodes and when the smoke clears the golem and its lower leg are no longer connected. It roars with rage, spewing jagged shards of ice that fall on the fleeing women.

“What next?” cries Elsa, helping her sister along. Anna gasps for breath.

“What do… you mean?”

“You’ve bought us some time and made it angry—angrier—so, what’s the next part of the plan?”

“Uh.”

Elsa glances back: the golem has not finished repairing itself, but it will be after them at any moment.

The sisters stumble forward. “Here,” says the elder, and they collapse behind an ice boulder. It is a worthless hiding place but it has them out of the golem’s line of vision, for a short while anyway. Perhaps it will give them time to form a plan of escape.

Time is a commodity her sister is running short on. For the first time Elsa takes in the full picture of the frost covering Anna’s skin, her blue lips, the cold radiating from her body.

“Oh, _Anna_.”

“Elsa,” puffs the younger. She holds out a frosted hand. “Face this… thing together. Remember?”

Tears welling, Elsa shakes her head. “Anna, you don’t understand—there is no facing anything. That thing, it’s indestructible.”

Anna closes her eyes and leans back against the ice. Her teeth chatter and she struggles for breath. Elsa can almost see the ice slowly immobilizing her lungs. “Always… a way. Rules... and ice monsters… are made… to be broken.”

“You need to get warm. That’s all that matters.”

Blue eyes snap open. Anna shakes her head. “You. Arendelle. Kristoff.”

“I don’t know what to do,” whispers Elsa.

“I’m… right here,” her sister says. “ _Together_.” She holds out her hand again, insistently this time.

Elsa curls her fingers around her sister’s. Hand in hand. For the first time since she can remember she does not feel alone. Cold as it is, Anna’s hand wraps her in comfort warmer than a blanket.

The sensation spurs a memory.

“Remember the banquet when Lord Ulric’s new cloak snagged on the punch bowl and knocked it over, and the punch flooded the hall all the way to the fireplace and all of it burst into flame? And we had to wait outside for hours before the air cleared, and we built snowmen of all the lords and ladies and Lady Carin was so angry about hers she dumped a bucket of boiling water on it?”

Anna snickers.

“Well, I know where we can find some boiling water.”

*

The men were impressively thorough. They must have soaked the entire remaining cache of dynamite in oil before setting it alight; smoke is still rising above the site of the once-regal battleship. The amount of dynamite necessary to blow up an entire ship is more than enough to keep the surrounding waters of the fjord boiling for some time, no matter how cold the weather. All they need do is lure the monster into the trap.

The sisters stand on opposite sides of the hole in the ice. Elsa protested about Anna being on the side closer to the golem, but was persuaded the plan would not work otherwise. She is the lure; Anna is the means. Steam rises from the water between them.

Elsa aims carefully and shoots a series of ice blasts around the fjord that the monster cannot miss. Within moments it comes crashing across the ice. The burning red eyes lock on her. It plunges forward like a hunter on the scent, fangs bared.

She does not move, though it takes all her faith in Anna to keep her in place. Her heart hammers as it gets closer. If this does not work, Anna’s life expectancy will be longer than hers.

It is yards away from the hole when Anna yanks up the rope ladder they have loosely strung between boulders. The golem’s feet tangle in it and it loses balance. It stumbles forward, directly into the scorching hot water of the ice hole. It falls with a splash as big as a tidal wave.

The sisters watch with wide eyes, hardly able to believe the plan worked. Now, if only the fjord will do its part.

The sharp edges of the golem melt away, growing smaller and smaller until it is nothing but a block of ice the size of a house, then a sled, then a plate. The water cools rapidly. Steam vanishes. The surface settles; bubbles fade away.

But it was enough. There is nothing left. The monster is gone.

Elsa turns triumphantly to Anna—only to find her collapsed on the ice.

“No!”

She rushes to her sister.

Anna can no longer move. Elsa cradles her against her shoulder. The cold of her body is numbing down to the bone.

“Hans said… you can save me.”

“Anna, I _can’t_. I don’t know how.” The tears streaming down her face fall on her sister’s hand and freeze instantly. “What are we going to do?” She cries harder. “I’m so sorry. I’ve failed you. I’ve failed Arendelle, I’ve failed you!”

Anna fights to speak. “Have I ever… asked you to be… perfect? So you… got it wrong. Do you think that… changes how much… I love you? I love you. I always have. No matter what.”

“I’m so sorry. For everything.”

Anna’s fingers turn to clear, pure ice. Her arms and legs go rigid.

“Wait,” Elsa sobs. “I have so much to tell you. How much I love you. How much I’ve always loved you.”

Anna smiles up at her. The ice surges up her neck and covers her face. Two pairs of eyes stare at each other: one pair ice-blue, the other solid ice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone who wants to snark about Olaf not dissolving when he hits the water, kindly refer to the movie ‘Frozen’ in which snow is able to TALK. 
> 
> Whether the water in the fjord would have actually kept boiling is, however, a mystery to me, Google, and my artistic license. 
> 
> During the American Prohibition Era, moonshine whiskey was 50% alcohol. To test whether it had been watered down, one would pour some in a dish and drop a match in; if the shine lit up, it passed. I will leave it to the liquor-savvy among you to determine the alcohol content of the punch at the banquet to make it possible for a floor’s worth to burst into flame. #disneydrinking


	11. Chapter 11

Elsa’s wail echoes off the mountain walls of the motionless fjord. She clutches Anna’s frozen form closer—as though it will keep her soul there, or delay what is already finished. But Anna is gone.

_We only have each other. All I have is you. What am I going to do?_

Tears roll down her face and hit the ice with faint hisses of steam. My brave, laughing sister. It feels as though her heart has been cut out of her body. The pain in her chest is blinding, but screaming will not relieve it—ripping the sky open will not repair the severance—breathing only proves that it is real and five seconds have passed without Anna, six, seven.

 _If only, if only_ , her life feels like a series of if-onlys, if only she had started with love, had shown it, received it, shared it. If only she had told the truth, not run away, not been born, all she does is hurt people, she has spent her whole life trying to keep Anna safe from her and because of her Anna is dead.

Elsa thought she knew every way it was possible to miss her sister, but this is worse than all of them combined. Anna behind the door, Anna down the hall, Anna down the mountain… these are different things than Anna gone from the world forever.

Dimly she registers the sound of footsteps running across the ice behind her. The noise grows louder. A familiar voice shouts jubilantly: “We saw! We saw the whole thing, you took the monster down, it was incredible—” He skids to a halt and pants with his hands on his knees. Right behind him are Olaf and the iceman and the reindeer.

She turns toward them, not loosening her grip on her sister, and for the first time they see what she holds.

Hans’ smile vanishes. His eyes move across Anna’s crystal-blue face in denial. Olaf does not share his surprise, but his face droops in sorrow; he pats the reindeer’s neck consolingly.

The iceman goes ashen. He stands very still, as might one who has received a fatal blow but cannot yet feel it. She looks away from the expression on his face.

Hans’ stunned eyes search hers. After a moment she shakes her head.

The fjord seems to have stopped breathing with them. It is silent and still, empty of sound or movement, not even the faintest stirring of a breeze. Elsa presses her forehead against her sister’s. Her tears flow ceaselessly, dripping off her chin and leaving small dents on Anna’s shirt of ice.

The iceman, his grief spinning into fury, turns on the prince. “Didn’t you kiss her?” he screams. “You’re her true love! I brought her back to you so that you could save her! _Didn’t you kiss her?_ ”

Hans looks stricken, as though it is his fault Anna is dead, not hers. “Yes. It didn’t work.”

His eyes meet hers. Elsa thinks she might vomit. She tried so hard to make Hans believe he is not in love with Anna, and it worked. She took this away from them. The kiss didn’t work because of her. She has killed her sister twice over.

A red light enters the iceman’s eyes . “It didn’t work? It didn’t _work?_ You’re her fiancé! How could it not work?! Or have you just been playing games this whole time?” He steps toward Hans, who watches him warily and fists his hands in preparation. The men circle each other slowly. “I’m just as upset as you by her death,” the prince tells the other.

“I highly doubt that.”

Their dance is interrupted by Olaf. “Look,” he says, pointing to Anna. The tears Elsa has shed onto her chest have merged into a shallow indentation, hardly more than a hairsbreadth deep. That is not what has caught the snowman’s attention, however.

“It’s spreading,” he breathes.

The melted patch broadens. As the outer layer expands, the colors on Anna’s chest begin to change. Blue ice shifts to white—to silver—to purple brocade. Elsa watches with wide eyes, afraid to move, afraid to breathe. It cannot be possible that Anna is thawing but—she is thawing. The ice recedes and gives way to the healthy pink skin of her neck, then her chin and her cheeks. Colors race across her body, spreading up, out, through to the tips of her fingers, to the ends of each copper braid.

Her ribcage expands, contracts. Anna is breathing.

And then she is warm in Elsa’s arms, and she is gazing at her sister in confusion and _blinking_ , and the edge of her cloak is shifting across the ice as she tries to sit up and her mouth is saying _Elsa?_ and the men are exclaiming in shock and joy and Elsa is bawling so hard she can hardly breathe.

Anna looks up at her and smiles. Elsa gulps for air and hugs her fiercely. They tumble sideways, unbalanced, and both emit shaky laughs and try to stand. The men help them to their feet. Anna hugs Olaf, hugs Hans, throws her arms around the iceman, who holds her with trembling hands. A moment later she is back at Elsa’s side, arms wrapped tightly around her sister as though never letting go.

Elsa says: “You’re alive. You’re okay. I can’t believe it.”

“Frankly, I can’t either. What happened?”

Hans tells the queen, “Your tears melted her heart.”

“Yes,” she answers, still dazed.

“ _Melted,_ Elsa.”

Anna takes a step back in surprise. “Melted?” Her eyes widen and a new light enters them.

The joy bursting through Elsa dims in an instant. Her breath comes faster. She closes her eyes— _steady, keep it together, don’t make another ice demon_ —and when she opens them again, four sets of eager eyes are looking at her. She can feel herself closing up against their anticipation and hope. How can they still not understand? Attempting to control her powers is akin to beating herself against a stone wall. Isn’t it enough to have Anna back?

They can see the wild panic on her face. Anna exchanges helpless looks with the iceman and Olaf; they are just as stumped for a solution as the queen.

The prince steps forward. “You are not alone, Elsa,” he says, and his voice is like a blast of warm wind cutting through a swirling ice storm. “We’re right here for you.”

She shakes her head vehemently. “You can’t help this. No one can help _this_.”

“ ‘One of the greatest purposes humanity has been given is to help each other along the road of life whether we are sprinting or hobbling’.”

The onlookers exchange slant-eyed glances.

“Waverly,” she murmurs. “ _Address to the Scholars of Atlantis_.”

“We all need each other, Elsa.” He steps closer and she stares, transfixed. “You are not the monster you fear you are. You are _not_ , and you do not have to be.”

Perhaps not. But oh, how easy it would be to surrender. What a relief to loosen her weak, cramping fingers from their tremulous hold of control. What bliss to slip beyond accountability into oblivion, to not have to be the one who fights. Wars such as these are lifelong. This only marks the beginning, and she is already so very, very tired.

Her eyes take in Anna, standing but a few feet away. Anna who should be dead but is more alive than ever, healed even to the once-white streak in her hair. Her gaze is pulled to Hans. His eyes are green as summer. She remembers his words beside the cookfire, spoken what feels like months ago. He has been here, too; he faced this fork in the road; his better side triumphed. He stands on the other side of the crevasse, and if he has done it, so might she.

She whispers, “Aren’t you ever afraid?”

“Yes,” he says. “But that’s only one part of it, isn’t it?”

She realizes—

One can be frightened and brave at the same time. What matters is where you place your weight: which feeling you’re counting on to fall through and which to carry you through.

She thinks—

I have been scared for thirteen years. I forgot about everyone else; I forgot everything but my own failure. It has become about me. What I can do, what I can’t.

If he thinks I can do this, maybe it’s true. Maybe I can.

I have been scared for thirteen years. I want to see what happens if I step out into air, without a thought for where the weight is placed. Without having to remember to think about it, because the only instinct is—trust.

Yet her arms hang heavy as stone at her sides.

Denial tightens her chest. She watches snowflake patterns frost the ice around her feet and fights to keep her breathing even. If she could do it, she would have by now. They are crazy. Anna steps forward, encouragement in her eyes, but Elsa moves back, afraid of what the slightest touch might do.

“What if I can’t unfreeze it? What if Arendelle stays frozen forever?”

Her sister shrugs. “We move.”

“What if winter follows us?”

Anna grins. “We’ll move to the desert. You’ll constantly freeze everything, it will always be melting. It’ll be a huge mess. Or not. Maybe you’ll just devastate the climate of an entire region again. Anything could happen.”

Anything could happen.

Something horrible. Or something amazing.

All these things she’s done: the ice palace, the huts, even the golem—if she could lasso her powers, what else might she be capable of? There are so many paths her life might take. The future is a mystery. For the first time she can remember Elsa sees the hope waiting there instead of the terror, the potential for excellence instead of the destruction. Oh, the things she might be capable of! She has spent her life imagining the pain she might inflict, but now she sees a glimpse—just a flash—of the good she might do. How she wants to! If only she could.

“I’m not strong enough,” she tells her sister. “I can’t do it on my own.” She does not have to repeat the rest. _What if I can’t? What if I can’t? What if—?_

Anna smiles slightly and takes Elsa’s hand in her warm one. She looks at her trustingly, expectantly, lovingly.

It does not matter if she can’t. Anna loves her regardless, and always will.

_Fear is like a skeleton. It’s what builds you into the person you are, and it keeps you that way._

All she wants is to be free—but all freedom really means is to not have to be herself. She realizes: perhaps that is just as crucial as bravery: accepting every part of herself, as Anna does. Loving herself all the way through. Refusing to be trapped in the sticky black morass that is her despair and self-loathing. She does not need to be perfect, or to fix herself, or be anyone other than exactly who she is.

_Rigid and breakable._

No. She is not made of this. No, fear is the glove she shed like a skin. Just a thin layer of external dust. What she is made of is so much bigger: the hot blood beneath, the pounding of her heart, the passion for life thrumming through her body. _Here she is, the best of her, the truth of her._

 _Gift or curse, I am more than this single ability. And I refuse to live any longer as a slave to fear._ She imagines the black morass and separates herself from it. Mentally she gauges the distance between them. If she walks away it will follow her… but she doesn’t have to feed it. Let it shrink and wither. Let it try to crawl down through her arms: it will fade long before reaching her fingertips.

She remembers words, like an echo from long ago: _The heart is not so easily changed, but the head can be persuaded._ How has she missed this? Fear begins in the mind. She remembers Hans’ safety-net presence when she made the ice huts, Anna’s smile as she woke from death, their love forming a foundation she cannot fall past. It exists within her, too, in her own heart: strong and sturdy and golden. And when she has no strength of her own, theirs is waiting. She already has the materials. The rest is her choice.

Adrenaline races through her. It does not arrive alone. An all too familiar feeling accompanies it, rolling in like fog, fear darkening the edges, panic trailing after. It sets her blood shaking, like a fever or stimulant, jarring and frenzied. She feels it surge up—too fast—too strong. The air turns colder.

She instructs herself:

Pull out the parts you recognize. Look each one in the face. Hold them until they rest—until you are again the one in command, not them. And release them, like a snowball unraveling itself in the air, turned back into harmless, shining flakes.

The flare dies down. She smiles, satisfied. She will not be dictated to by fear or panic or lack of control. It will be a lifelong battle, but she will only lose if she gives up. It cannot defeat her. What has she been so afraid of? It only has what life she gives it.

She pulls her power out again, slowly, so that it burns within her like the low embers of a fire. She draws it up, up, up, pulling it through her body, light as a summer breeze across the wavetops, like sunshine rushing through her veins.

It rises within her like a small sun. When her body is full and glowing with it, it radiates out to link to the world around her. She finds its edges, reaching out to the very limits of the ice she has made, and grips it. Then she pulls gently.

Snow lifts off trees and sails and roofs. A reverse snowfall swirls over Arendelle, gathering in the sky high above the fjord. A flurry of white as thick as a blizzard fills the air. Stone streets emerge once more, followed by metal lampposts and wooden carts. Color returns with the unveiling of all the summer flowers, with the green expanses of grass and pines. Waterfalls resume their course down the beautiful rock walls of the fjord.

Ships shift as the ice in the fjord recedes in a shiver of silver. With a twist of her hand, the queen cuts a circle into the ice around the six of them so that they stay afloat as the white landscape gives way to lapping blue waves. The others watch with wonderment as the world thaws. The reindeer chases the ascending snowflakes without success, and the iceman pats his neck affectionately.

Elsa gathers the snow into a mass high above her head. She shrinks it down until all that remains is a shining plane of ice in the form of a snowflake. One more twist and the snowflake vanishes in an explosion of ice, like a crystalline firework, vanishing before it touches them.

She brings her gaze back down to earth. When she turns to the others the first thing she sees is the warm pride diffusing Hans’ face. As she watches, the misty white cloud of his breath fades away into the sunlight. A gust of spring wind goes howling through the fjord.

His smile deepens at the sight of her beaming face. She cannot seem to tear her eyes away from his. He steps toward her right as she starts to move toward him.

Anna touches her shoulder, a nervous gesture. “Uh—Elsa—”

The ice under their feet is tipping and giving way to water. Elsa lifts the slab through the air, living cargo and all, to deposit them on the deck of the nearest ship. They stumble and slide off the slab as it disintegrates into slush, and the next moment they have surrounded her, faces wreathed with smiles.

Blushing at their praise and pleading with them to stop (she cannot accept thanks for circumventing a disaster of her own making), she is thankful for the distraction provided by Olaf, who promptly begin to melt as soon as the last icicle has vanished. A wave of her hand and he is whole again, but it was enough to silence them, albeit briefly. She does not know how to receive praise; much as she craves the words, they have been so absent from her life that she does not know the right response, nor does she entirely believe them.

Not only that, she wants badly to have just a minute to herself to process what she has just done. She looks around the group, feeling her desperation grow. Anna may be sweet-natured but cannot be called perceptive. She meets Elsa’s shock with a shower of ecstasies, all of which are affirmed by the iceman (Elsa still does not know his name, and is too embarrassed to ask now) while Olaf loudly enumerates her triumphs to no one in particular; even the reindeer looks congratulatory, and bounds across the deck in jubilant loops.

Hans remarks, “Someone is going to have to sail this thing to shore.”

Anna’s hand shoots up. The iceman says, “Are you kidding? You’ve never sailed a thing in your life.”

“Sleigh, ship, same basic concept.”

“You call that driving?”

They argue their way up the stairs to the helm. Elsa gives Hans a look of gratitude, which he receives with a small smile and bow of his head. Then he follows the pair up the steps, gesturing for Olaf to follow, and Elsa is alone.

She holds on to the rail for balance and realizes belatedly that it has not iced over at her touch. She flexes her fingers, wondering what the future will see them create.

The absence of her burden makes her feel so light she might rise into the sky and be carried off by the four winds. There are so many things to feel—relief, gratitude, disbelief, and quite a bit of shock that is unlikely to wear off quickly. She has not anticipated such a rush of emotions and instinctively tries to block them before realizing that she is free to feel every single one, all the way through.

“Come on, Elsa,” Anna calls. “Let’s go home.”

To no one’s surprise the co-captains fight for control of the wheel all the way across the fjord. The result of this is an indefensibly long voyage, but Elsa is grateful for every extra minute of respite. The world has been righted; there is nothing to run from or to; new peace has settled into her soul. She tips her face toward the sun and closes her eyes, wishing she knew what kind of reception waited for her on shore.

Even this short trip across the water has taken the color out of Anna’s skin, though it is nowhere near the typical green tinge it turns when sailing. To a close observer, she appears to have positioned herself with some precision within arm’s reach of Elsa while staying at the elbow of the iceman. Despite their bickering, her smiles are frequent and her laughter punctuates the air around the ship, mingling with the chop of water against the hull and the breeze that has come down from the mountains.

“Ready to eat your words?” she inquires of the iceman, who is watching her with folded arms and an expression of amusement. The group ducks as the boom swings over their heads and the stern begins to veer left.

Elsa cannot help but notice that Anna does not stammer or flush the way she did whenever interacting with Hans. There is an assurance about her, a calmness that was not there before; she looks at the man beside her as though all her questions have found their answers in him. It is a familiar feeling.

Hans is watching the couple too; the look on his face is one of dawning comprehension. After a moment he looks away to smile at his boots.

The ship is met by rowboats as they return to the harbor proper. Elsa gapes. Everywhere she looks, small watercraft are overflowing with cheering Arendellians, scarves and flags and ribbons fluttering, arms waving frenziedly. The crowd at the shore is overwhelming: noisy and exultant and terribly proud of their queen. Their wide smiles are like an embrace. She realizes the whole town has been watching.

A deep-throated chuckle sounds from the prince. She scans the scene for what has caused it. Smiling, Hans points to a cluster of people at the forefront of the crowd. There stand their men: the fickle mountain company. All of them are there, waiting, grinning, fists on their hips; and trussed up on the ground at their feet are the missing henchmen from Weselton.

“We caught them for you, Your Majesty. You had plenty of other things to worry about.” They are pleased as punch with themselves.

“What shall we do with them, Your Majesty?”

She very nearly refers them to Hans. Catching herself, she realizes their faces are clear of fear or doubt. They have turned to her with confidence and expectation, not him. They _are_ her men, after all. These are her people.

One of the women steps forward and offers her a bouquet of flowers: an armful of long-stemmed white roses, their scent rising to meet her like a friend.

“Welcome home, Queen Elsa.”

“Home,” she repeats, and locates Anna’s hand to clasp in her own.

“Well?” someone shouts, and she is sure it is one of her expeditioners. “Let’s get back to that party!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for your patience, everyone. To say the chapters on the fjord were tough to plot is an understatement. My #2 biggest beef with this film is the final solution to frozen Anna/fearful Elsa. One does not simply LOVE their way out of panic attacks and ingrown fear. I do, however, firmly believe in the power of a supportive community, including one that encourages you to be all that you’re capable of even when you might not share their confidence—and loves you even when you aren’t. Reworking these concepts was trickier than I anticipated. [For the curious: #1 is (obviously) how they handled Hans as a villain. While I adore a good plot twist, I was not okay with how Disney built that deception—this article (don’t miss page 2!) does an excellent job articulating why: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/12/-em-frozen-em-s-cynical-twist-on-prince-charming/282204/
> 
> I also wanted to see the movie incorporate the original element of the shard in Kai’s eye being washed away by Gerda’s tears, which did not make an appearance for obvious Tangled reasons but since I don’t have to avoid similarities I put it back in. [#3: pretending the movie is based on/has anything at all in common with the fairytale. (I’ve read that an early version of the plot involved HANS having the frozen heart—which in addition to being a potentially awesome storyline might have actually had an actual link to the Anderson tale. *buries head in arms*)]
> 
> -After that list I feel I should mention some of the things I really enjoyed: SISTERS; Elsa’s no-romance-needed storyline (despite this fic); Elsa’s hair; a did-NOT-see-that-coming plot twist (despite this rant); the orchestral score; Olaf.


	12. Chapter 12

** PART 3: Epilogue **

Elsa sits on the broad stone rail of the bedroom balcony, propped against an ivy-wrapped column with her arms looped around her nightgown-clad knees. She leans her head back, looking at the town lights below, enjoying the soft warm night breeze and the low cacophony of cricket-song. Behind her the doors stand wide open; the light inside floods out across the stone in a sheet of gold.

Cheerful lights from the town glow like a greeting. They are probably still dancing in the streets down there. Bonfires flicker in the distance. The people were so glad to see the ice depart, they are delighted to be overheated.

She has been frozen, too, turning herself to ice for thirteen years; but she is free now. Now she is eager for life with all its vast promise and mystery. She feels as though she has been given herself back, and she vows not to take it for granted. There will be days her faith is gone… and for those days she has Anna. If Anna had only known the truth, all these years—they could have conquered this together long ago.

She thinks: This is my life, with all its weight and locks and lightness and simplicity and mistakes and hope. She has spent her life telling herself the story of her childhood like a tale in a book, living in the memories. Time to make new ones.

Anna enters the room. She is dressed in dark green satin; a few daisies still dangle from her hair. She looks like the spirit of summer, come to wake the forest. She locates her sister and comes out to see what she is looking at.

“Good idea,” she says, and suddenly Elsa is wearing a summer dress of pale blue linen and her little sister’s hand is wrapped around her wrist, tugging her toward the fire-lit streets and the dancing occupants. She almost says she’s too tired, they ought to go to bed, it has been a long day. But she has hardly been outside and never like this, so very late that the flavor of the city is entirely different from what she witnessed just that afternoon.

They wander around the town with all the lights in the city illuminating the streets and patterned flags strung above them on cords and passerby overflowing with warmth and jubilation, too happy to stop the party, which has grown on itself so much that (she suspects) they have forgotten the reason they are still celebrating but are having too much fun to abandon the revelry yet.

Somehow the sisters end up in a little pub whose warm lights and music call to them through all the open windows and doors. The place is teeming with people, all merry and smiling and lifting their voices to be heard. Anna grins and whirls away to fetch two tankards of hard cider. When she returns the barkeep is right behind her. He says “Don’t they _feed_ youse up in that castle?” and drops two bowls overflowing with stew in front of them with a clatter. Though she has barely eaten anything in days, Elsa’s stomach was in knots during the banquet supper. Now she is ravenous. Even Anna does not pause to speak until both bowls are scraped clean.

A group of musicians in the corner up at the front has been going strong all the time, but suddenly the tune shifts to a jig. People start clapping, and dancing, and whistling and shouting and she must know just who is kicking up such a ruckus. She cranes her head over and through the throng and when she gets her answer she is not surprised. It is her men again, her mountain group, playing and singing as though calling in spring.

Anna looks at her and laughs. They clap in rhythm until their hands sting and sing along with the chorus when they can catch the words of songs she wishes she knew. The music fills her with a wonderful hunger. She whispers a question to her neighbor and is told: two fiddles, a flute, a harmonica, two lutes, and one accordion too many.

Elsa does not realize how wide her smile is until her cheeks begin to ache but she can’t keep it off her face. The crowd cannot sit still, and sooner or later Anna was bound to be swept into the frenzy but Elsa stays in her seat, trying to absorb every detail, knowing she will replay this night in her mind for years to come.

The players jump from one tune to another. Sometimes they start all together; sometimes just one lone instrument wails out a string of notes, the others joining one by one, just the like the singers in the snow, until they’re making an exultant mess of sound that cannot be contained by four simple walls and it pours out of the windows and doors and overflows into the street and sets her heart thundering.

It is a wonder the shingles don’t fly off the roof. The onlookers sing and stomp and shout, whirling around the room with hands clasped and elbows linked, and they toast each other and they toast the queen and they toast summer, and the candles gutter and are relit and their throats grow hoarse and they collapse against each other in laughter and they throw their heads back to roar the lyrics and Elsa sits there thinking This is home.

Hours later the sisters wander back into the castle, waving at the baffled guard, who did not see them leave. Anna says drowsily, “I like the open gates.”

Elsa squeezes her hand gently. “We are never closing them again.”

Earlier that day they had their beds moved into the same room—a new one that they picked together. Elsa counts just under two minutes before Anna crawls under the covers beside her.

Both are too wound up to sleep. Anna, who has found her second wind, relates the minute-by-minute account of everything that happened after the queen fled across the fjord—her journey up and down the mountain, collecting companions, the failed kiss—until the moment they met again on the ice. Elsa tells her own tale with far fewer details.

Anna remembers everything now; her lost childhood memories returned when the ice inside her melted. Knowing the truth does not make the long years of silence any better, but it cleans the wound. “You were my whole world, and suddenly you were gone. I couldn’t figure out what I’d done,” she says.

Elsa tells her, “I’ve missed you so much. I’ve missed you for years.”

She drifts off to sleep with Anna’s voice in her ear, warmed by her body and by the renewed symmetry of their minds, as though they are picking up straight from where they left off before they were separated. _I have my sister back_ , beat both their hearts.

*

That the people are happy is perhaps the only upside of the cataclysm’s conclusion. Reports of loss and ruin grow longer by the hour. Those few days of winter will leave lasting scars.

Most severe is the devastation visited by the ice demon upon the anchored ships. Many were decimated; more are irreparable. Thankfully, neighboring countries are sending emergency supplies to sate Arendelle’s immediate need for food. They are generous allies: what they give will replenish most of what was lost and will provide a foundation to begin rebuilding the outlying farms whose acres of crops were killed. Most of the supply ships have a secondary purpose: they will provide passage home to the ambassadors whose vessels were destroyed.

Trouble outside the city, trouble within. Elsa tours the town with a team of building assessors, who point out so much construction and foundational damage that her head swims. Repairs will take at least two years, they predict.

Such news would be even more disheartening were she not coming at it fresh from her triumph; the world still shines like a new thing, and what are a few building projects in comparison, after all? They must rebuild, so they will rebuild. Not only that, they will improve. Stronger and greener and sturdier—possibilities abound.

In jarring contrast to the damage reports, the queen’s coronation festivities continue. She would have cancelled them after the first day were it not for the people, who need something to celebrate amidst the wreckage. They eagerly attend parades and public theatricals and boat races. When they sleep is anyone’s guess, for the lights across town never seem to go out.

*

Elsa spends every second she can with Anna, and by default the iceman, who seems set to become a permanent fixture in their lives. Hans is at all the public events, sometimes nearby but usually not, out of consideration for Anna’s new suitor; though possessing nothing but friendly feeling toward the prince, Anna feels his close presence would be awkward. Elsa does not know how to explain that she would prefer it otherwise—besides which, Anna’s happiness is her most important priority.

And yet she knows where he is at all times. That head of shining copper is always in the corner of her eye. When she catches him looking at her she has no way of knowing if his eyes are on her for the same reason _everyone’s_ are—because she is the central figure of Arendelle—and chides herself for hoping otherwise.

Perhaps as a result of her days on the mountain, her reaction to the iceman is unexpectedly mild.

Anna says, “Why are you so much friendlier to the idea of Kristoff?”

“I thought his name was Sven.”

“Well, let’s be honest, he answers to both. Stop trying to change the subject. I know what this is. It’s a personal bias. You prefer him because he’s blond. The redheads have been consigned to the snow heap—”

“If Kristopher—”

“ _Kristoff_.”

The people are happy for Anna, if bewildered. They are fond of Hans; not only that, they trust him. Anna’s sudden engagement was made palatable by the prince himself, whose heart of gold was observed by them all during the first wave of the winter crisis. Now they have been told to replace the keeper of their affection and loyalty with an unsociable iceman, a stranger, another apparent whim of the princess.

Elsa groans into her hands.

A steady diet of confusion is the only thing the royal sisters have provided since exploding back into public life. Arendelle’s confidence in them can only stretch so far. She vows to stop testing her people. It is time to prove her mettle as queen—as a leader who can bring peace and prosperity to her people, not simply cause and mend catastrophes.

For her part, Anna does not understand why no one is adjusting more quickly to the news. _She_ has.

“Even if Kristoff wasn’t in the picture, which he definitely _is_ , Hans and I aren’t meant to be. Our failure of a true-love’s-kiss proved it. Between you and me, I was pretty relieved to have hard proof, and I think he was too.”

When at length she conceives a way to endear Kristoff to the people, Elsa immediately presents the plan to her sister. Anna is enthusiastic. The pair summons Kristoff, who has a terrible cold from his icewater plunge.

Elsa announces, “From now on, I will be providing ice to Arendelle.”

“Your sister just put me out of a job,” Kristoff tells Anna, who only smiles at him.

“Not at all,” the queen tells him. “I am merely moving the source closer to home. There is still a need for distributors. And if you still wish to work as an iceman, I have a proposition for you.”

 _Arendelle Ice Master and Deliverer_ is the title they settled on, and Elsa is rather charmed by how red and dumbstruck he turns. The idea is a simple one: she will make ice and he will deliver it. The appeal for the people is that she will personalize each order of ice—emblazoning the surface with images or messages or fashioning it into shapes. Delivering each order by hand will give him an opportunity to meet everyone in person; she theorizes that the more they interact with him, the faster they’ll warm up to him.

“This is going to be a huge hit at parties,” says Olaf. “Will you make mine in the shape of a swan?”

*

All the men from the mountain party are awarded medals of valor in a public ceremony during which Hans is also knighted—nominally, of course, as he is not Arendellian; but he accepts the honor with more pleasure than most of the natives upon whom she has bestowed knighthood.

When she stands before him to lay the sword on his shoulders, he looks up and winks at her. She tries to hide her smile; this is her first ceremonial duty performed as queen, and the solemnity in the room is almost tangible. The spines of the other recipients are ramrod-straight, their starched collars exuding formality, their expressions reverent. She tugs her mouth back into sobriety but not before he flashes her a broad, unconcealed smile in return.

Far less enjoyable is the next duty she must perform: her first trial to oversee. After hours of debate and questioning, the three men from Weselton are sentenced to death for breaking the Weselton-Arendellaise treaty, treachery toward an allied country, and attempted assassination of an allied sovereign.

The queen watches the execution from a balcony overlooking the courtyard. Few observers are present, one of the reasons she elected to hold it at dawn. Even Anna is absent; she offered the moral support of her presence, but Elsa told her to stay in bed. The queen stands alone at the rail, hating the necessity of this, hating that she had to choose that men would die. Easier said than done (for all that they tried to kill her) to condemn men begging for mercy—who swear they were only following orders—who swear they were trying to save Arendelle.

She is almost naïve enough to believe them, but the truth is that they don’t like the idea of Her Majesty Elsa the First, Queen of Arendelle and deadly weapon. Her powers equip her with the ever-ready means to defend her people or attack her enemies. She understands their concern but cannot sympathize with their resultant choices; and so justice wins out over mercy.

They are led out in chains and locate her within seconds. Even from this distance she can see the hatred burning in their eyes, which is only cut off when the bags are pulled over their heads. Even so, it is unquenched; she can see it in the tension of their shoulders. She wishes she could wash the sight from her memory, already knowing it will return in nightmares.

A large warm hand closes over hers. Her fingers tighten around it, her eyes never moving from the gallows. When everything is over she relaxes and it slides out of her grasp. A departing footstep sounds on the flagstones behind her; then nothing can be heard but the flags flapping in the summer breeze.

*

Her days are full of meetings with ambassadors who hold the same concerns as did the Duke, though with less drastic means of securing their safety. She repeats assurances and reassurances until she could say them in her sleep. Treaties are reassessed, alliances re-sworn. The peace of old is guaranteed for the future.

—And something new.

Move to the desert, Anna had said, and while Elsa had no plans to invade Agrabah and overpower it with flooding and destruction, it occurred to her there might be mutual benefits to a river somewhere in the region. Fertile land for them, trade and passage privileges for Arendelle—such were the bases an alliance might be built on.

With her Council she took this concept and expanded it. She would be providing ice to Arendelle—why not Arendelle’s trade partners? Hours are spent developing ice and other trade partnerships with their foreign allies. She goes to bed each night exhausted and elated and brimming with ideas.

Perhaps not such a poor queen, after all.

*

Anna hurls a snowball at a second floor window. The powder explodes across the glass and begins melting, joining other watery streaks that are the only remaining evidence of the volley that has been in progress for the last four minutes.

“He’s probably exhausted,” says Elsa. “You made him practice the Winter Waltz for three hours yesterday.”

“If _I’m_ awake, it is _definitely_ time for him to be awake.” Anna scoops up another handful of snow and begins patting it into a lopsided ball.

The window opens and a tousled blond head appears above them. He says nothing, just glares.

“Come down and build snowmen with us!” calls the princess.

Kristoff blinks, studying the snow oasis Elsa has created within the birch grove, as might someone trying to decide if he is hallucinating or cognizant. He groans wordlessly and vanishes into the darkness of the room.

Soon thereafter, though, he strolls across the lawn to join them, carrots in hand. His reindeer slinks out of the castle behind him.

Quite a crowd awaits him in the grove, starting with the entire royal family of Arendelle back to four generations. Sven the reindeer noses at a sculpture of Olaf, carrot nose beckoning, and nearly leaps into Kristoff’s arms with a yawk when the snowman bursts into motion with a shout of _Boo!_ The reindeer retreats in high dudgeon; Olaf commences to cackle with laughter until he wheezes.

The man watches the sisters in silence. “Let me see if I have this straight,” he says after a minute. “She builds the snow people, and you watch.”

“I am a pivotal part of the development process. Elsa, you forgot to give the Grand Duke of Tremaine a bouffant. See?”

Kristoff rolls his eyes. He good-naturedly joins in, however, fashioning a lumpy snow sculpture that he explains to a skeptical Anna is a perfect representation of a Reindeer at Rest.

Elsa absently grows miniature castles; her stress relief seems to find its root in architecture, and she weaves tiny balustrades and turrets as easily and thoughtlessly as others might sketch with a pencil. She particularly likes to etch details into the surface, so that the walls resemble stone and the windows might be mistaken for patterned glass.

Suddenly Anna exclaims, “Hans!”

The southern prince looks as startled to see them as they are to see him, and even Sitron looks unsure of what to do from where he stands at his master’s shoulder, bridle lead dangling from Hans’ hand. Man and horse have just finished exercising, evidently—both glow with exertion beneath a sheen of sweat. The prince wears riding boots and breeches, but his coat and vest have been discarded in favor of a loose navy-blue shirt, and his hair is tousled and dark with perspiration.

Elsa can feel heat crawling up her face and knows she must be red as an apple. She wishes she could bury her head in the snow.

No one speaks. She realizes protocol dictates that she open the conversation. Only, for the life of her she cannot think of anything to say.

“Hello,” she manages, at the same time he says “Good morning.”

“Oh, excuse my interrupting—”

“Please go ahead—”

“Oh, no—you were saying?”

“I wouldn’t think of it.”

Anna’s eyes shift between her sister and the prince.

“I, uh—I hope you and Sitron have spent a pleasant morning.”

“Oh. Yes. Very.”

“I’m going to find some hot cocoa to warm up with,” says Anna, _much_ too casually. “Kristoff, join me?”

She drags him away. Elsa listens to his voice growing fainter: “I don’t want any. I’m not cold. _It’s not winter anymore_.”

Olaf trundles after them. Sitron and Sven, after briefly sniffing around each other, wander off together to explore the foliage.

The remaining royals stand awkwardly, both of them unsure how to backpedal into the camaraderie they shared before the element of Anna was brought back into the environment. She is acutely aware that for all that he has been _present_ , this is the first time they have spoken privately since their argument during the attack.

He clears his throat. _Don’t call me Your Majesty_ , Elsa thinks fervently. _Don’t call me Your Majesty_. Before he speaks, though, his eyes fall on the assemblage of snow people behind her. A look of intrigue crosses his face, replacing the uncertain politesse to which they have both resorted. He steps forward for a better look, forgetting anything but his curiosity, and all formality evaporates like mist in the sun.

He shakes his head admiringly. “You’re really very gifted, you know.”

She raises an eyebrow at him.

He chuckles. “I mean the artistry. All of these things that you make… the mimicry, the patterns. You have an artist’s eye. If I had your powers I still couldn’t make anything like this. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

She gestures to the snow reindeer. “You and Kristoff can be my first students.”

He stops before the sculpture of Kristoff himself, Anna’s request immediately following the construction of their parents. Elsa does not know how to interpret the look on the prince’s face.

“What is it?”

He is slow to answer. “When I was outside your cell, waiting for you to wake up, I had a lot of time to think.” He shakes his head. “I guess it’s just strange to realize how simply some problems can be resolved… or impossible obstacles, overcome.”

“Good thing, too—if I hadn’t been able to break open those manacles you welded onto me, you’d be attending Anna’s coronation ball tonight.” She speaks teasingly but becomes sincere. “I could not have done this without you and Anna, Hans. With all my heart, you have my deepest gratitude. I will never forget what you have done both for me and for my people.” She shakes her head: “ _Strange_ too, to realize how easily all this might have been avoided if I had told the truth to Anna years ago, like you said.”

“I’d have never met you.”

“ _Well_ —she wouldn’t have been so desperate for a friend that she would accept just about anyone’s marriage proposal, of course—”

“No, I am being quite literal. If I may speak bluntly: a week ago you were not exactly high on the list of royal Who’s Who. If you had been, I’d have never been chosen to represent my family and the Southern Isles at your coronation.”

“Do you wish one of your brothers had been here for the catastrophe instead?”

“I’ve taken to calling it an adventure, myself; and I wouldn’t trade it for a throne.”

He smiles at her, tipping his head to the side, and she mirrors him. His eyes linger on her face, then turn serious.

“How has it been, Elsa?”

She takes a deep breath. “Honestly? Overwhelming. Everything is new. Becoming queen would have been enough to tackle on its own, but that’s only one part of it. Having my powers under control, having Anna back—it’s a whole new life.” She smiles. “Overwhelming—but in a lot of good ways.”

A ground-floor window bangs open, framing Anna’s face. “Elsa! Council meeting. You’re going to be late.”

The queen groans. “Fill in for me?”

“Not on your life.”

“Hans? Last chance before you depart and forfeit all authority.”

He laughs. “Not on your life.”

She sighs and trudges through the snow to the stone walkway that winds through the castle gardens. At the path she turns back to look at him. He is watching her; he has not moved.

“Will you be there tonight?” she asks shyly.

He squints. “Will there be quiches?”

“…Quiches?”

“You know. Baked egg and cheese in pastry shells. I like those miniature ones that you can pop right into your mouth—”

“See you this evening, Hans.”

She walks away to the sound of him chuckling.


	13. Chapter 13

All the windows in the castle are aglow. Every door is open to the warm summer night, including the gates; all of Arendelle has been invited to this, the last celebratory coronation event, and all levels of society mingle within the castle and without. The party in the ballroom has long since spilled out into the courtyard, over which lights are strung from rooftops to ice sculptures. The background hum of insects mingles with the notes of the string ensemble, and the scent of night-blooming flowers floats through the ballroom.

Elsa wears a gown that is red as blood, as red as the rose that she wears in her fair hair. Her sleeves stop at her elbows; the sweetheart neckline skims below her collarbones and leaves her shoulders bare. Her skirt bells out around her and snowflakes are embroidered in darker red all down the length of the train. Stardust seems to have settled on the fabric—it glints faintly in the light every time she moves. She has opted for a long braid again, though she allowed her maids to fuss over it; they twined thin braids all through her hair before twisting the mass together, smoothing and pomading it until they were satisfied that the style befit a queen.

Anna is in gold. White patterns decorate her hem and a diamond hangs from a thin white ribbon around her neck. Her entire gown is layered with a sheer fabric that shimmers in the candlelight, and though her shoulders are covered the sleeves are made of the same transparent gold. A red rose identical to the queen’s adorns her hair, which is twisted and tucked into a copper knot at the base of her neck.

The sisters have never looked lovelier, but their gowns cannot claim all the credit. Side by side, arms linked, they present a very different picture from the tableau of the failed first ball. Both are flushed with excitement; their wide smiles are almost incandescent and they distribute them among their guests without reserve. There is a contentment, an openness there that was not there before—as though they have found their place of safety and rest and have no need of anything else.

The opening bars of the Winter Waltz float across the room and Kristoff holds out his hand to Anna. Stay on solid ground, she warns him, which he answers with a grin and a bow of acquiescence. They whirl onto the dance floor, keeping to the polished marble. Beyond them, a large portion of the center of the room is covered in a perfectly circular sheet of white ice, grounded dancers rimming the edges, skaters whirling within.

Elsa leisurely weaves her way through the crowd. In the absence of any fear about the exposure of her powers or the ill effects of powers unleashed, she is able to indulge her genuine affection and curiosity. Her cheery informality draws the people to her. She greets as many guests as she can, is given hordes of introductions she will never remember and well-wishes she will not forget, tries to sample as much as possible from the banquet table (ice swan fountain included) so that she can give honest praise to the chefs who have been slaving over the feast, and artfully avoids every entreaty to dance.

Eventually she makes her way back to her sister’s side. The waltz has ended, and as it is the only dance Kristoff knows and Anna has no interest in joining the skaters, they have made camp within a few yards of the banquet table. They stand together with plates in hand, pointing out people and sights of interest to each other. The queen is privately relieved to see that the reindeer is nowhere to be seen—or, more importantly, smelled. From the slightly forlorn look on Kristoff’s face, she is willing to bet Sven is cozily ensconced in the iceman’s bedroom, fortified with an extra bushel of carrots and safe from the company of other people.

Elsa gives her sister a look of affection. Anna is entranced by the spectacle of music and light and movement. She watches the activity around her with shining eyes. Here is the fulfillment of everything for which her heart has longed for years.

To Kristoff, the queen asks politely, “Are you enjoying yourself?”

“I’m not saying I’m not, but Hans implied there would be quiches.”

She does a double take. After a beat she realizes he is teasing her, albeit gently, in an attempt to befriend the sister of the woman he loves, who also happens to be the queen of the country. He is trying.

Anna says, “I forgot to tell you. Kristoff and Hans became friends when no one was looking. It _seems_ the joint forces of Sven and Sitron managed to break into the fruit and vegetable cellar. They found the carrots and apples and evidently thought Christmas had come early this year.”

“Amazing, the bonds forged when an enraged master chef is waving a cleaver in both your faces,” remarks Kristoff.

“They’ve been fishing in the fjord all afternoon,” says Anna in tones of disgust. “While we were being stuck with pins by the dressmaker, that’s what they were doing.”

“Well, I for one appreciate the sacrifice,” Kristoff tells her, looking admiringly at her gown. She beams at him.

An eager-looking ambassador approaches the trio. Elsa indicates Anna with a slight tilt of her head and slant of her eyes. He wheels the princess away to join the throng on the dance floor, plate still in hand and a confounded expression on her face.

“Catch anything?” Elsa asks Kristoff. She can try too.

His eyes light up. The queen beholds this with some trepidation. She wonders if she is going to regret foisting Anna into the arms of the ambassador; eventually karma takes note of such acts and metes out consequences, and this is the fourth time tonight she has used her sister to fend off applicants eager for her company on the dance floor.

By the time her breathless sister is deposited back into their company, Kristoff has almost convinced Elsa to go on an ice-fishing expedition. He is in mid-description of the art of reading the ice for thick and thin patches when a winded figure in gold breaks up their tête-à-tête and fixes Elsa with a stink eye.

“You really ought to join the royal ballet,” the queen compliments her innocently.

Anna growls, “If you make me dance with one more maniac ambassador, I’ll push you into the punch bowl.”

“That would be a shame,” says a new voice. “The punch is _very_ good.”

Elsa’s heart begins drumming in her chest. They greet Hans as one, Kristoff slapping him on the back, the sisters extending their hands for him to bow over. The prince is in dark green, his black boots polished to a shine and his necktie white as snow.

Anna tells him, “We were just talking about you. Where have you been?”

“Have you tried the ice floor?” Kristoff looks longingly across the ballroom, denied demonstration of his one actual talent in an environment such as this.

“No, I haven’t been dancing. A man over there was a soldier in the army that battled the Mongol horde. There’s a debate raging over the pros and cons of destruction via heat, such as boiling water, versus methods of force or weight, say, an avalanche. They’ll be at it all evening, I’d wager, and in the morning they’ll present the queen with a list of better options for how she might have destroyed the golem.”

“As well as a full critique of the use of airborne explosives and the necessity of blowing up a ship,” Kristoff mutters. “Remind me to sleep in.”

A new dance begins and Anna looks hopefully at Hans. Kristoff, to whom Anna in well-meaning honesty has told every detail of her history with the prince, seems to be uneasily remembering the results of the last time the pair danced together. But Hans seems content to simply stand with them, enjoying the spectacle and the company. He explains the finer points of one of the waltzes to Kristoff.

Elsa watches another couple go sprawling across the ice floor. “Was this a good idea?” she asks Anna anxiously. “It feels so extravagant. And we already had a ball. Is it too repetitive?”

“You’re overthinking this,” says Anna, wagging a finger at her. “What is there to debate? The people are happy. That’s the point.” She shakes her head at Kristoff. “Leave it to my sister to provide critical analysis of her own party.”

Elsa relaxes and rejoinders teasingly, “Says the one who can only seem to follow her heart. Thinking things through is part of my job, remember?”

“I for one can’t think of a lovelier way to celebrate your ascension to the throne,” puts in Hans. And there again is the pride in his voice, and the confidence in her abilities that she does not yet completely share, and the genuine wish for her wellbeing and Arendelle’s. How does he communicate so much with so little? she wonders, thanking him with a smile that takes up her whole face.

Kristoff nudges Anna. They melt into the crowd with record subtlety, so that by the time Elsa realizes they are missing, her dancing scapegoat is already spinning across the dance floor in the arms of an iceman.

In the golden light of the ballroom the prince’s eyes are darker than usual, and they are locked on her. She knows instinctively that he is going to ask her to dance. She dreads it, and craves it, and hopes her palms aren’t hot. He stands in front of her with an expectant air and she still has no answer prepared.

“I never got a chance to dance with you the night of your coronation.” He leaves the obvious (Anna; ice calamity) unsaid.

“I never dance.” Dancing requires touch.

“Never before,” he corrects. “I am a good teacher,” he informs her, holding out his hands.

He _is_ a good teacher, she a poor student. They turn in circles across the ice, laughing together at her mistakes. Elsa can hardly think straight for the contentment and longing battling within her; when she finally realizes she is falling into old habits— _don’t feel_ —she abandons the attempt to police every emotion and allows herself to be swept into the flood of sensation—his body so close, his hand on the small of her back radiating warmth through her body from forehead to feet. She is singing inside to be near him again, looking straight at him, his eyes on her, his words spoken in answer to hers—and for the first time she lets it shine freely from her face. The happiness that leaps into his eyes at seeing it makes her breathless and nervous and certain all at once.

The brilliant blur of the ballroom settles a little when she finally looks away from him. A very different glow—one she has learned accompanies any sensation of _home_ —warms her heart from the inside out at the sight of the merriment in the faces of the people around her: smiling as they spin to the tempo of the orchestra, crashing on the ice and laughing, gliding into each other’s arms.

What is this? she wonders distantly. This feeling like her heart is about to float away, like all the world is beautiful, like it would be harder to suppress her smile than let it rest on her face all evening. Then, quite suddenly, like the first bright edge of the rising sun on the horizon or walking through an open doorway, understanding hits her. I am happy, she realizes. _Happiness_. This is what it feels like to be happy without stopping.

She has never before been excited about the uncertain future, but now she can feel it like adrenaline racing through her hands and arms and stomach. Eager to live it, whatever it is. Fully feeling every high and low point, whatever may come of it.

Hans leads her out onto a balcony to cool down. In the half-light the night provides a shelter of sorts; they will not be interrupted here. She inhales the scent of honeysuckle and night-blooming roses.

The prince leans on the wide balustrade and grins at her. “Well, the party is almost over. What’s next? Another adventure?”

“No,” she says firmly. “No more surprises. My people have sustained enough shocks to last them the rest of my rule. Steady and stable—that is the new theme. No more scandal, no more change. Kristoff wants to teach me ice-fishing. That will have to suffice for adventure, at least until the drainage system is rebuilt.”

“No rest for the royal, hm? What’s wrong with the drains?”

“A major pipe burst and now half the sewers are backed up. There’s no way to pipe water in to clear it out, and even when the pipe is repaired it will only add more water to the obstruction. The only option seems to be to clean out everything, which no one is keen to volunteer for and which will be extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive, and start again.”

At that moment the light from the nearest doorway is blocked. She glances over to see a couple standing just within the entrance. She recognizes an ambassador’s aide and an Arendellian lady. They lean toward each other in an unmistakable posture of flirtation: his head is bent over hers, his eyes drinking her in; her head is tipped to one side, the smile on her lips teasing.

Elsa is suddenly mortified. If ever she needed reminding of just how inexperienced she is when it comes to interacting with other people, _any_ people, let alone a handsome young man such as the one at her side— _Drainage!_ She wishes she could undo the last three minutes, and failing that, fall off the balcony and thus with any luck make him forget the conversation at hand.

“Why don’t you freeze it again? Not the pipes, just the blockage. The icemen would make short work of it. Cart everything out in blocks of ice and patch up the pipes, and voilà: suddenly you’re twiddling your thumbs and ready for a new escapade.”

A slow smile spreads across her face.

Just then raised voices reach them. The balcony is a long one, with many doors leading out to it from the ballroom, and it is broken up at various points by collections of foliage in gargantuan ceramic pots and draperies hanging from upper terraces and the like. The group speaking is blocked from view by a thick red velvet curtain, but their voices carry and the queen cannot help overhearing. Evidently they are watching Anna and Kristoff, who are dancing near the balcony doors. Strains of a waltz float through the door over the noise of conversation within; it is not the Winter Waltz, so Anna must have been persuasive. The flirting couple moves off; Elsa cranes her head and catches a glimpse of whirling gold circling a pillar of blue.

“How does he keep pace with her?” the voices wonder aloud. On and off the dance floor, is the implication.

Elsa smiles to herself. They are looking at it backwards. Kristoff does not try to keep up with Anna, or even want to. He stays in one place and waits; her whirlwind trajectory always carries her back to his sturdy foothold.

Unsurprisingly, the topic of conversation shifts to Hans. The unseen group seems to be wholly Arendellian, as they speak from the perspective of sorrow—they are devastated that they’re losing him, and talk at length about how much they adore him. This iceman of Princess Anna’s seems to make her happy, and that’s nice enough for her, but what about the rest of them? The populace is heartbroken.

A lady ventures, “The queen and the prince seem very friendly this evening.”

“Naturally. We have all heard about their descent from the North Mountain. Such circumstances would cause anyone to bond. Even more so when he was meant to be a member of the family.”

“But don’t you think it’s possible that there might be— _you_ know— _something there?_ ”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Only a cad would propose to two women within the space of a week. Sisters, no less! It would be an unforgivable insult to both of them.”

The others chime in, talking over each other:

“Who could countenance it? Who would believe his feelings genuine?”

“Mark my words. He still loves the princess, he’s keeping close…”

“…tell you what he’s feeling. Ambition. He’s positioned himself nicely…”

“Nonsense! We all saw him during the ice storm, there isn’t an insincere bone in his body…”

“…nothing to worry about, the queen would not be so rash—”

The pair on the other side of the curtain cannot help but overhear every word. Elsa goes very still. An observer might draw parallels between her and one of the ice sculptures in the courtyard. Her smile has vanished. She looks ahead blindly, her gaze turned inward.

Watching her, the joy drains from his face.

They are standing a little apart. He steps across the flagstones to stand in front of her and she looks up at him as though shaken out of sleep. He takes her face in his hands and looks at her for a long, breathless moment.

With a sense of dread she registers that the warmth in his eyes is gone. Blankness has taken its place; his thoughts are masked. She knows that look—how often has she worn it herself?

Hans says: “Excuse me, Your Majesty.”

Then he walks away.

The crowd in the ballroom is still whirling beneath the golden lights. They look up in surprise as snowflakes, slow and soft as feathers, drift down onto their hair and shoulders. They shine in the light and seem to dance in the air, and everyone is charmed.


	14. Chapter 14

She wakes on an uncomfortable surface, at a strange angle. Lifting her head and stretching, she remembers: she went out onto the bedroom balcony to pace, so as not to wake Anna. In a moment of exhaustion she knelt to rest her head on the stone rail and must have dozed off. Other than that, she has hardly slept.

She has her powers under control, she has Anna back, her people and land are safely returned to summer. Her allies are satisfied and her damaged country is set to prosper. She has everything her heart ever ached for during all those long years sealed in her ice-coated chamber. And she is selfish enough to want more! How greedy can she be? Shame and misery fill her in equal measures.

Elsa has gone over every argument they overheard, trying to pinpoint which one precipitated his departure. She has gone over words he said, things she thought she read in his eyes, and the only conclusion she has reached is that the throne of Arendelle has never been graced by such a fool as she. She could writhe with agony over her idiocy—to assume so much, to hope so far! He has made it clear on numerous occasions that he has no desire to rule. Was he simply amusing himself, was he taking it for granted that his relationship with her sister would prevent her reading too deeply into anything he said or did? How imprudent of her, besides!—what was she thinking, she just met him, can’t she take her own advice? Following one’s heart is all well and good until it turns out that one misread every sign.

But we could have been so happy, she wants to scream. We could have made each other so happy. All she can do is bury her face in her arms. She feels hollow and hopeless. And stupid and selfish. And alone in a way wholly different than any she has heretofore known.

Actions speak louder than words, goes the saying, but the truth is that words are just as important, especially when they have not been spoken. The facts are that he left last night and he is leaving now, and she has seen enough to be certain that if he wanted things to be otherwise he would have said so.

*

With the days of revelry ended, the ambassadors return home. The harbor is crowded with departing ships towing broken vessels behind them; the docks overflow with sailors and cargo and well-wishers.

The queen is there to see the ambassadors off. She does not have to; protocol does not require her presence, and all bid her a formal goodbye at the end of the ball the night before. Only one of them has not taken leave of her, with the exception of a short note ending with the seal of the Southern Isles that she would stake her life on a scrupulous steward having written. So she is there on the docks, braced for humiliation, to put herself through the exquisite torture of seeing him one last time.

The sailors point her to the foredeck, empty but for a single figure in a gray coat. He stands at the rail, ostensibly overseeing the ship’s preparation, his back now turned to the activity below. Elsa folds her arms across her stomach and grips her elbows. She walks forward.

His attention is fixed on something beyond the ship, so he does not notice her approach. Coming to the head of the wooden stairs, she lets her gaze linger on the slant of his shoulders as he leans his forearms on the rail, ginger hair flopping across his forehead in the breeze, neck turned to watch—

Anna and Kristoff go flying past the craft, shrieking with laughter. Earlier that morning Elsa made an ice path for Kristoff’s sled, and the pair of them have spent hours frolicking around the harbor, calling out requests for ice bridges and racing the departing ships, exuding happiness.

She privately admits to a thread of jealousy towards the iceman. Her sister and she have re-forged their friendship, and now that they can finally spend time together, Kristoff is Anna’s new focus. To his credit, he tries to share the princess. For her part, Anna is thoughtless.

The prince knows as well as she how it feels to live through one lonely day after another. They had both perfected smiles and lies and masks and armor. Those walls were finally coming down, and now—

She had felt so safe with him. Like she could rest in his presence, without having to force an attitude she did not feel; that he was ready to cover her vulnerable places with his strength. And she had sensed that he felt the same about her.

Now she shies away from the longing and loneliness she sees in his eyes, his too much of a mirror of her own. He knows what she has lived, and is now experiencing, and will experience when he goes. And he is about to return to his own version of it. Her heart twists. What is she going to do without him? What will he do without her?

Then—unbidden panic turns Elsa’s blood ice-cold. Why is he watching Anna with such an expression on his face? She recalls words of the night before. Of every theory presented by their unwelcome neighbors, the notion of Anna seemed so absurd she did not bother to examine the question. Could it be Anna? The more she thinks about it, the more sense it makes: Anna fell in love with Kristoff, and Hans, putting her desires above his own, graciously provided her with a way out of her hasty promise. Is that it, then? The thought makes her nauseous.

She does not know what to believe.

Don’t feel, she thinks automatically, and this time it is a relief to step back behind the wall.

“Prince Hans.”

She watches him put on a smile and perform a stiff Southern bow. “Queen Elsa.” He glances at her, then away.

“Is all well with your vessel?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“I’ve come to wish you a safe return voyage.”

“Thank you.”

“I look forward to building our trade partnership.”

“Certainly. And when your drainage system is rebuilt and you’re sick of ice fishing, you might consider taking a holiday in the Southern Isles. My parents would be delighted to host you.”

“And you?” she ventures, with more bravery than she believed she possessed.

“I believe I will travel. Many of your guests have made me curious about their lands. I shall go home first, however.”

“You must miss your family.”

“Some more than others,” he says absently. “Less than I’ll miss… friends here.”

“I am sorry you and Anna didn’t work out.”

At that he turns to face her. The fire in his eyes is difficult to meet straight on but it is better than the blankness. “Is that right? You wouldn’t bless our engagement and you told me more than once why I couldn’t possibly be in love with a woman I’d just met. And now you’re sympathetic?”

She growls, “I’m being courteous. You are the departing hero, and you look depressed and it stands to reason Anna has something to do with it.”

“Elsa,” he says impatiently. “Tell me one thing. Have you assumed this sudden blindness by choice?”

“You are cross this morning, and unkind.”

“If I am it is because you’ve provoked it.”

“What do you want from me, then, Hans?”

He sounds affronted. “Your decisions are your own, Elsa. Just don’t expect me to rejoice over all of them.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

At the genuine bewilderment in her tone, he looks confounded. “You don’t mean to say—You must _know_. I want to sail away knowing that at least you _know_. Not—not all this rigmarole about my feelings for your sister!”

“Feelings you swore were valid!”

He says carefully, “Anna is like a bird of paradise. It is easy to become transfixed by the loveliest attributes and feel the need to look no further. She and I have an easy rapport and plenty in common, and that seemed like a good enough foundation for a marriage, but I was mistaken. I thought I wanted a mirror, a duplicate self. Since I met you, I’ve started to see things differently.”

Just like that, she is once again uncertain of her footing. She has come to doubt every surety; to that repertoire, she adds doubts of every doubt. Wholly out of her element, she takes refuge in repetition. “But Anna—”

“Elsa! Anna and I were never going to share a happily ever after. I was mistaken. We were both mistaken. What we thought was love was really friendship. Have you forgotten? The kiss did not work because I am not Anna’s true love and she is not mine.” He says these last words _at_ her, frustration ringing in his voice, and his eyes hold a challenge—read my meaning, prove me wrong.

She stares at the shimmering water of the fjord. “Why did you disappear so suddenly last night?”

“I—” He runs a hand over his face. “I thought you—” He shakes his head. “Because quite suddenly, a very cherished hope I held was killed.”

“What was it?”

He looks anguished. “You don’t know, then. Or you pretend not to. I think, in that case, you will be happier without the knowledge.”

“I disagree entirely!”

He stands silent. Turning away, he looks at Anna and Kristoff, takes a last long look at Arendelle. “Everything I ever wanted is staring me in the face, and I have to walk away.” He tells her, “I’m not usually impulsive. But I was so desperate to keep what I had found: _home_. I thought I had to grab before it slipped away. I used Anna for that, and I’m not proud of it, although I will say that at the time I believed it was love. That has changed, but the rest hasn’t. This place has got hold of me. The people, the city… You, more than anything.”

“Hans. Please. What sent you away?”

Some time passes before he answers. They watch the canvas sail drop behind them, cutting them off from the rest of the world with finality. Not long to departure, now.

He says, “ ‘No more surprises, no more upheaval’.”

Not any argument but hers, then. The knowledge makes her stupidly happy. Duty. He thought it was about duty. And he thought he was, in turn, performing his. Of course—he is accustomed to being the second choice, the last resort.

She says, “That is for the queen to judge.”

Something changes in his eyes. He takes a step closer to her. “I am not here because I crave power, Elsa. Or because I’m holding a torch for your sister. Anna will always be dear to me. She was the first person to ever offer me a true home. She is family. But _you_ —you make me want to journey down every road life has to offer.” Suddenly he’s red, stumbling over his words—“Will you go with me?”

She can feel her heart beating _hard, loud_. “We barely know each other,” she whispers.

“Don’t we!”

She tucks her shaking hands into the folds of her dress, not missing the irony that until just recently they have been safely hidden away in gloves or iron casings. “I love to sing,” she says, all in a rush. “I’m actually very good at it. I happen to love heights, partly because I’ve never feared them. Sailing often makes me seasick too but I _am_ a morning person.” She drifts off because he is smiling all the way from the deep sea green depths of his eyes and oh it makes her heart turn over.

She blurts, “I never said you had to leave.”

“Elsa—”

“You didn’t even ask me what I wanted, last night!”

“Elsa.”

“What?” she pleads.

He looks into the eyes that are searching his. Then he kisses her.

She jerks backward, startled. His arms are around her, so she does not go far. In a heartbeat she has recovered herself and is pulling herself back to him, her mouth searching for his.

He is warm everywhere. His lips moving against hers, his heartbeat under her palm, the arms holding her tightly to him—she feels strangely possessive of these things, as though they are half of herself, and part of him is now irrevocably composed of her.

He speaks against her mouth. “All I want is you. On any terms. I’d be a stableboy, muck out the royal stalls every day, if it meant having you.”

She tips her head back to look her fill at him, wondering if what is in his eyes is again reflected in hers, knowing it is. _Every road life has to offer_ , he said. “Where would you want to go?”

“I would go to the ends of the earth for you.”

She laughs shakily. “I don’t want you to go to the ends of the earth.”

His smile broadens. He knows what she is going to say. “What would you have me do?”

Her heart is light, light—glowing, burning, streaming sunshine.

“Stay.”

 

*** * * THE END!!! * * ***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this was an effective catharsis for everyone like me whose high hopes for Hans were dashed to pieces. For those of you who would adore Frozen in any shape or form, I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed (re)creating it.
> 
> A fond farewell to those who have been along for the ride from the very beginning – your patience is great indeed. A GIGANTIC hug to everyone who encouraged, recommended, and/or gave feedback. Your eagerness for the next installment carried me through a few rough patches and your comments often had me walking on air. Thank you from the bottom of my heart! (I’m going to miss y’all a whole lot!)


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